vikingvisuals's reviews
62 reviews

The collection is wonderful and amongst all the translations I've come across Walter Kaufmann's translations have always been my favorite.

My only complaint about the book is that it is selections from various works rather than the complete works. I've read in other Nietzsche translations and collections that Kaufmann did not originally give much care to these particular works and that may thus be why he only provided selections. With that in mind I'd recommend this book as a good overview or introduction to Nietzsche, however not the best version to buy if wanting to expand or review his complete works in more detail.

Survival in Auschwitz is a book that, upon reading, one cannot quite put it into words once finished. Primo Levi's retelling of his time in Auschwitz is one unlike any other. Rather than focus on the terrifying things that went on in Auschwitz, he focuses on his perceptions of life in the camp as a Häftling with a strong emphasis on the notions of survival. Where does the will to survival in a concentration camp arise and how does one go about delaying their demise long enough to see their survival is ensured? The question is more simply put than it is answered, and the summation of the book can be seen as an attempt at answering some such question.

Of course, the book is also filled with haunting insights and reflections about the horrifying things that went on in the camp, but this is more of an undertone and makes the book have an almost surreal quality. You know what went on was terrible, yet the way Levi focuses on mostly just particular events of his experience with the atrocities more-so in the background allows the book to focus on something otherwise not usually spoken of. This also makes the book much more appealing to those who may want to know more about the lives of those in the camp without wanting to subject themselves to the more unbearable and terrifying realities. Often, while reading this book, I had to recollect myself and remind myself that I was reading about Auschwitz. The way Levi writes is reminiscent of reading about the happenings of a modern day prison that one can be sucked into the details without realizing exactly what type of "prison" he is talking about, and that these "prisoners" are not ones one would expect to find in any prison. Thus, the book also creates a very meaningful case in the ways that otherwise upstanding and well-to-do people become very much like any other prisoner when objected to such conditions and the fight for life.

The book despite being generally a matter-of-factual personal account of what went on does not fail to place a deeper meaning upon each anecdote. Often each chapter is introduced and concluded with such meditations, and as such one can gain something from each chapter that is more than just a personal account of one prisoners experiences. One can also, if they so choose, read any chapter individually or together in summation and still be able to glean some understanding and some profound, albeit harrowing, meaning from it. I often found myself rereading passages or skipping back to previous chapters to relate it to something I just read. Doing so was easy, as Levi manages to keep everything in distinct focus and with distinct reasoning, which is no small feat for someone talking about their personal experience at Auschwitz.

I really do not know what else to say about this book that it does not say itself. What I can say is that its perspective and its message is completely unique. The way that Levi delivers that message is profound and nothing short of amazing. I can very easily see why this has been considered one of the most important books written about the holocaust. I recommend this book to everyone; one of the few books that I can honestly say the whole world should read. Everyone would gain something from it, and not just in a sense of extra historical knowledge. What this book provides is much more ethereal than that.

Philosophical Investigations is for me one of the most important philosophical texts of all time, written by one of the most interesting to read philosophers. Perhaps I am biased in that I share a lot of the same ideas as Wittgenstein and have a love for the idea of language and just how extremely important (and misleading) language can be in the world that we essentially create out of it, but it definitely was an influential text even outside of my own personal bias and gave birth to some of the greatest ideas in the field of logic.

I will not discuss the content of the book too much, as it is seemingly well known by anyone who may be studying philosophy or logic (although for a good summary, look no further than section 109: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."). What I will say is that the writing, whether or not one may agree with the ideas expressed, is absolutely mesmerizing. One can clearly see the strong understanding and care Wittgenstein had for language just in the way he used it: "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." Or his perfect summation of philosophy: "So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound." If for just those sentences alone, this book was worth the read, but of course it contains much more and with a much more profound and well argumented framework.

The unfortunate thing about this book and the other major work(s) of Wittgenstein is that, if you are anything like me, it may start to destroy your appreciation for a lot of philosophy, most noticeably what philosophy has become. Wittgenstein managed to disassemble countless philosophical problems simply by showing, with the understanding of logic and language, that there simply were no problems to begin with (such ideas were of course advanced further by Russell and logicians following him). In that vein one begins to see a pattern where philosophy continues to find problems where no problems are justified or provide justifications for solutions to real problems where no solutions are currently justifiable. It is not my task to talk down about philosophy here, as it is always a subject that I love and has always been a large part of who I am: however when one takes into consideration the many points that Wittgenstein, either directly or indirectly, was making one starts to learn just how shaky some of the foundations of our longest held philosophies always were. It is in this sense that I admire this book the most, for the vast amount of ground it was able to cover (and destroy) simply with ideas of language and the ways in which we use and understand our language.


Speaking of language, the translation from G.E.M. Anscombe is one of the more superbly done tasks in the realm of translation of philosophical texts. Anscombe, being an analytic philosopher herself, clearly had a wonderful understanding of both the language and its intended content. Wittgenstein is certainly not one of the easiest philosophers to read, in German or in English, and although no translation is ever perfect one would be hard pressed to hand pick any mistakes made in this one. If you are looking for the best translation available: look no further than Anscombe!

Now I have reached the limits of what I can currently say about this book, and in that sense I will heed the words of Wittgenstein from his earlier work of the Tractatus: "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

I give Searle credit for recognizing that there is no current explanation or understanding of how consciousness works. However, despite this lack of explanation in the physical realm he goes on to state the wonderfully outdated Cartesian ideas that have increasingly hindered rather than helped this understanding. I think that arguing along the lines of 'we will never have a third-person understanding of consciousness because consciousness is simply a first-person experience' and that neuroscience and other fields of research into consciousness' lack of explanation is an automatic sign that there is no explanatoin are both faulty arguments and one's that seem to keep humanity in a further state of ignorance rather than in a state of exploration and revelation.

Perhaps consciousness is something that cannot be explained, perhaps it is simply a first person "insight" that only each individuals can know of themselves better than anyone else, but I do not believe that at all to be the case. I kind of see the problems of consciousness in the same way that various philosophical problems from the greeks or even more modern philosophies were solved as human progress and understanding of the world expanded. Luckily for Searle and the others in his camp, we are not yet at the stage at which consciousness has a vast and proven framework with which it works so there theses are, in their eyes, currently holding ground. But I can not stand on ground myself that bases itself off the idea of ignorance (or better stated, that my own personal understanding of myself and my world is automatically more colorful than those around me, in a sort of "third-person ignorance" way) and hope that these grounds hold. I much rather prefer the further research into these ideas, especially as our understanding of the world progresses, as a potential means of truly explaining these concepts and not just leaving them as a pandora's box not needing to be open.

I should state that this is, however, not a formal book in it's own right. It is more or less just a republication of Searle's review of other books in regards to consciousness. He attempts to argue against most of the ideas expressed in the books and works of others, and although he does manage to make some good points at times, I believe he is misguided in his overarching idea of consciousness. It is the sort of things that philosophers do that irritates the rest of the world, and it is the sort of philosophy that I personally stand against.

Since it is a review of other books and thus not a formal writing, I believe it is better as a companion to other works of philosophy of consciousness, although even in that regard there are enough arguments between philosophers that you can find anywhere else online simply by searching that the ideas in this book are nothing that couldn't be acquired in shorter versions elsewhere. The area of consciousness is probably the msot hotly debated area of philosophy, so there is no shortage of arguments and counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments from all sides.