Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic by Baltas, Aristides

Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic

"I can work best now while peeling potatoes. . . . It is for me what lens-grinding...
€124,86 EUR
€124,86 EUR
SKU: 9780822944164
Product Type: Books
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Author: Aristides Baltas
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: €124,86
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Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic by Baltas, Aristides

Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic

€124,86

Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic

€124,86
Author: Aristides Baltas
Format: Hardcover
Language: English

"I can work best now while peeling potatoes. . . . It is for me what lens-grinding was for Spinoza."--L. Wittgenstein

More than 250 years separate the publication of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Both are considered monumental philosophical treatises, produced during markedly different times in human history, and notoriously challenging to interpret. In Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses, Aristides Baltas contends that these works bear a striking similarity based on the idea of "radical immanence." Each purports to understand the world, thought, and language from the inside and in a way leading to the dissolution of all philosophy. In that guise, both offer a powerful argument against fundamentalism of all sorts and kinds.

To Spinoza, God is just Nature. God is not above or separate from the world, humanity, or mere objects for, as Nature, He inheres in everything. To Wittgenstein, logic is not above or separate from language, thought, and the world. The hardness of the logical "must" inheres in states of affairs, facts, thoughts, and linguistic acts. Outside there are no truths or sense--only nonsense.

Through close readings of the texts based on lessons drawn from radical paradigm change in science, Baltas finds in both works a single-minded purpose, implacable reasoning, and an austerity of style that are rare in the history of philosophy. He analyzes the structure and content of each treatise, the authors' intentions, the limitations and possibilities afforded by scientific discovery in their respective eras, their radical opposition to prevailing philosophical views, and draws out the particulars, as well as the implications, of the arresting match between the two.



Author: Aristides Baltas
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 02/03/2012
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.60h x 6.60w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780822944164


Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2012

About the Author

Aristides Baltas teaches at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. He is coeditor of Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives.




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