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  • Assembling Reminders: Studies in the Genesis of Wittgenstein’s Concept of Philosophy
  • Newton Garver
Alan Janik . Assembling Reminders: Studies in the Genesis of Wittgenstein’s Concept of Philosophy. Stockholm: Santérus Academic Press, 2006. Pp. 246. Paper, $40.00.

Janik's book is a wonderful achievement, filling an obvious and long-neglected gap in Wittgenstein scholarship. The plan of the book is simple and straightforward. Citing the well-known passage in Culture and Value where Wittgenstein identifies ten persons from whom he has taken seminal ideas for his work of clarification, Janik clarifies how each contributed to the development of Wittgenstein's distinctive approach to philosophy—except in the case of Piero Sraffa, about whose influence Janik (like others) can find nothing to say. The result is triple insight: into each of the sources discussed, into Viennese intellectual history, and into the rich and complex texture of Wittgenstein's thought. The title underplays the breadth and depth of the work, and there are few readers who will not come away having learned something about Wittgenstein, about his fascinating sources, about the intellectual history of the last century, and about philosophy.

The chapter on Ludwig Boltzmann, first of those Wittgenstein named, stresses Boltzmann's view that reason often overshoots the mark, systematizing more than facts and language allow. Janik quotes Boltzmann (39):

Progress in thinking must much rather be sought by eliminating concepts which, experience tells us, do not advance but mislead and even tangle us in contradictions. These [End Page 671] forms of inference and concepts always arise when originally appropriate modes of thought are transferred to cases where they do not fit.

Wittgenstein could never have written this, since progress was anathema to him and he eschewed such causal generalizations. But Janik rightly emphasizes this bold line of thought as one that Wittgenstein seized upon and held through his final days, when we find it embedded, for example, in the sharp distinction between knowledge and certainty in §308 of On Certainty, with knowledge subject to types of rational scrutiny (doubt and proof) that are inappropriate for certainty.

How do we manage that part of our belief system where reason misleads? Janik suggests an answer through a brilliantly original reading of Heinrich Hertz, the other physicist on Wittgenstein's list. Like Boltzmann, Hertz held that the empirical details of physics require careful scrutiny and deserve skeptical aloofness in the absence of proof, but matters of theory, on the other hand, admit of alternative representations, which may be held simultaneously even though they seem to conflict. Beyond the empirical level we need to show rather than assert, and for this models are indispensable. Wittgenstein turned this aspect of Hertz's philosophy of science into a pillar of his own philosophical thinking, first through the picture theory and the showing/saying distinction in the Tractatus and later through his use of queries, analogies, and thought experiments to coax his readers along. Janik calls this hermeneutics.

Schopenhauer, Frege, and Russell are more familiar, and Janik recounts their contributions well, though disparaging Russell. He gives Russell credit for convincing Wittgenstein that the logical form of a proposition may differ from its grammatical form, and that subject-predicate grammar is often misleading. But Russell falls afoul of Boltzmann's critique of reason by scorning limits on reason that Boltzmann and Wittgenstein felt deeply. Janik, like Ray Monk, sides so thoroughly with Wittgenstein that he cannot refrain from describing Russell's stance as "playing fast and loose with axioms"

The four final chapters, on Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Otto Weininger, and Oswald Spengler, are especially helpful for American readers. They bring understanding of little known aspects of thinking dominant in Vienna a century ago, and make a convincing case for crediting such thinking with major lines in Wittgenstein's thought. As with Boltzmann and Hertz, these thinkers may not have recognized their thoughts after Wittgenstein seized and transformed them, but Janik brings to life a sense of living history that makes sense out of these final figures in Wittgenstein's list. As elsewhere, Janik depends competently on secondary as well as primary sources.

Scholars deserve better editing than Janik enjoyed. There are unnecessary repetitions in the...

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