[Fwd: Re: book: wittgenstein's poker]

[Justin Schwartz]

Russell won a Nobel Prize for Literature. Quine, Davidson, and Rorty are all 
excellent stylists--short on clarity, perhaps, and in Quine's case a bit 
precious, but craftsmanlike. My old dissertation adviser Allen Gibbard 
writes beautiful, accessible, easy-to read prose. The prose of the old 
positivists--Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach--has a certain diamond-hard 
elegance; it's not pretty, but it's so crystalline and clear that that is a 
sort of beauty. So style is not alien to AP. However, the Tractarian W would 
have vehenmently rejectedthe idea that he was an AP, which at thetime would 
have meant part of Moorea nd Russell's kick vs. British Hegelianism. jks


>
>Why not?  Russell, Wittgenstein, and A.J. Ayer were all excellent writers
>who could craft beautiful prose.
>
>Jim F.
>
> >
> > -- Luke
> >
> >
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