I guess this underlines the subjective nature of the word "profound." If Aristotle isn't profound, I don't know what the word means. I'm not a classical scholar and don't know Greek, though I have had classes in Aristotle, and had the privilege of working through some of the Nicomachean Ethics with Michael Frede, one of the great classical scholars of our time. Tht was long ago, of course. I used to teach the NE in ethics classes when I was a professor. My tentative conclusion is that Aristitle is the greatest mind that ever existed, at least that I am aware of. But I guess he's not profound.
Well, I'm a pragmatist anyway, any we are happily banal, so maybe I should not be surprised if the greatest mind in history had nothing profound to say.
And people have spent their entire careers puzzling out bits -- bits! - of Wittgenstein. Though he's not on the level of Aristotle.
>
> After reading the book Wittgenstein's Poker, one is
> not tempted to read Wittegenstein.:)
I haven't read W's Poker, is it any good? W himself is actuallly fun to read -- especially, I think, for them as likes Derrida or Nietzsche. He writes in little parables and questions, almost zen-like, generating puzzles and mostly not solving them. I am talking about the later W. The Tractatus is even nore like this, but presented in the manner of Spinoza, as if it had solutions. W is also an extraordinarily fine prose writer if you can read German, something the translations on dimly echo. He's actually capable of exceptional beauty, as in the famous apothogem that coclcludes the Tractatus:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen.
With translates roughly as, That about which one cannot speak, one must remain silent. But this does not capture the poetry of the German, which is I believe in iambic pentameter, although the line is a bit long, and the nice assocances and near assonances, the "ch's" and "k's: in "nicht sprechen kann" and also the "ch's" and "sch's" in "nicht sprechen . . . muss man schweigeb," and the interplay between the soft vowls "o," "ue" and "u" and the harder ones "i", "e", And "a." It's quite lovely. A lot of W is as carefully composed.
jks
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