Noticed in Aquinas on Mind, by Anthony Kenny:
The ability to write philosophical prose easily comprehensible to the lay reader is a gift which Aquinas shares with Descartes, but which was denied to Wittgenstein and Aristotle. Wittgenstein did, of course, write a plain and beautiful German; the difficulty for the non-philosopher, reading his later works, is not in construing particular sentences, but in understanding the point of saying any of the things he said. With Aristotle it is the other way round; it is clear that what he is saying is of immense importance, but the problem is to discover what meaning it has, or which of the seven possible meanings is the intended one.
Well, I have read a very little bit of Wittgenstein in German, and cannot testify to the plainness or beauty of his prose. I am grateful to the translators who wrestle with the difficulties of Aristotle.
A page or so later in the book there appears
Bertrand Russell was one of those who accused Aquinas of not being a real philosopher because he was looking for reasons for what he already believed. It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life.
At first glance that seems a little unfair to Russell, but is it?
Most of my misspent youth was misspent in the usual stupid ways but one weekend of it was misspent in a hotel room in Chartres trying to get to grips with a book by Bertrand Russell and failing. Where I got the book and why I chose to spend a weekend with it in Chartres I no longer remember. I learned from that weekend one thing only - avoid Bertrand Russell. ZMKC
ReplyDeleteI don't know how well practicing philosophers now think of Russell--an obiter dictum seen in passing in something by Richard Rorty makes me think that they are a bit dismissive. A wasted weekend can be hard to forgive. I think worse of Isaac Asimov and Dave Eggers than I otherwise might (well, maybe not the latter) because of three-day weekends spent reading their prolix memoirs.
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