Philosopher Kieran Setiya (MIT) comments; an excerpt:
With rare exceptions, analytic philosophy cannot be read as poetry. If it has value, it’s not the value of artistic achievement, unless perhaps in the medium of thought. Nor does analytic philosophy explore “the problem of life.” There’s plenty of work in applied philosophy, including ethics, engaging with practical questions—climate change, democracy, the treatment of non-human animals. But these are not the sorts of problems Wittgenstein fought. For the most part, analytic philosophy is detached, at least in its self-image, from the personal struggles of philosophers.
Not just philosophy, but philosophers: that is what these notebooks help us to see. A philosophy of philosophers, even—shown, if not said.
What is lost in this detachment? The fact that philosophy, even in its technical forms, is the expression of an outlook that defines who someone is. “To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth,” the novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote. She was on to something, I believe, even when the subject-matter of philosophy is not ethics or aesthetics but logic and metaphysics. It’s an astounding fact that someone would devote their life to the question “What is necessary truth?” or that they would write, in code, on one side of a notebook, “Much anxiety! I was close to tears!!!!” and on the facing page, “A question: can we manage without simple objects in logic?” The content of one’s metaphysics, like the content of one’s character, is a way of seeing the world. And the connection between them is a philosophical matter....
All of this was known to Nietzsche, of course.
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