Word: wittgenstein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...blind that will scan a printed page and turn it into speech" [May 14]. In fact, we already have such a machine for blind patrons. It is a Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), which over 50 blind New Yorkers are using to read everything from science fiction to Wittgenstein...
...Technique, Barrett argues that even if we survive, the familiar world may well recede from our grasp, supplanted by systems that aspire to control human destiny. Barrett contends that philosophy can recall us to that world. To support his claim he cites three modern figures: Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James. However divergent in their styles of thought, they shared Kant's conviction that freedom was the principal issue philosophy had to address. For Wittgenstein, freedom resides in the ambiguity of language; for Heidegger, in the fluid, indeterminate character of being; for William James, in the workings...
...does not end up talking to herself. For the controversial subject of communication between humans and animals can be one long semantic rabbit hole down which any curious Alice can easily lose her orientation. Definitions of language differ among physiologists, behaviorists, linguists and philosophers, with the gloomy Ludwig Wittgenstein once suggesting that even if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. Sapient quadrupeds and "talking" lesser primates could also challenge a sacred precept of Western culture: that man is superior to nature...
Handke's combination of Kafka's elemental terror and Wittgenstein's linguistic austerity is both formidable and unique. Certainly no one of note now writing in the U.S. works in his mode...
Read demonstrates a restrained enthusiasm for bringing these criminals to life on the page. But he also avoids romanticizing them with a league-of-gentlemen myth. Mostly, the sources of his book are an unsavory lot, greedy and loutish. One, however, had a taste for Flaubert and Wittgenstein, another the skill and nerve to become a professional racing-car driver, and a third possessed a spontaneously poetic soul. He greeted the dawn after the successful holdup with lines from Omar Khayyám: "Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night/ Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars...