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285. WINTERTON PRESS. COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor. The Devil’s Thoughts and Apologia Pro vita Sua. new York. Kelly. Winterton Press. 1989.
£98
Folio, original cloth backed marbled paper covered boards, lettered in gilt on spine. Printed in red and black. Spine slightly sunned otherwise a very good copy.
285 Limited edition of 60 numbered copies. A handsomely printed edition. An ASSociATion coPY oF GREAT imPoRTAncE 286.WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig Josef Johann Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, Ltd. 1922 £4,500
8vo. original dark blue cloth, gilt lettering to spine; pp. 189 + 16 [ads.], parallel texts in German and English; cloth cockled to upper board, crease to corner of lower board, very good. Provenance: this copy belonged to David Guest (1911-1938), with his marginal annotations throughout. Guest was one of Wittgenstein’s students at cambridge and matriculated in 1929, the year of the philosopher’s arrival there. he was the son of Leslie haden-Guest, 1st Baron haden-Guest, the Labour politician, and was noted early on for his strong political views: “The most open, defiant and fanatical of all the cambridge Spanish civil War brigade was David haden Guest, ... Guest went to Trinity where he was even more noted for his truculence, scruffiness and puritanical attitude” (Richard Deacon, The British Connection: Russia’s manipulation of British individuals and institutions, London, 1979). Guest spent his second year at the University of Göttingen, where he witnessed nazi aggression and was arrested for his part in a communist-led anti-nazi parade. he was held in solitary confinement and was only released after going on hunger strike. he returned to England convinced that marxism was the only way to fight fascism and after graduating worked as a teacher and lecturer (in moscow, amongst other places) for the communist party. he felt compelled to join the international Brigade in the Spanish civil War in 1938 and was killed by a sniper on 28th July that year. his connection to Wittgenstein was manifested in two ways after his death: firstly, in the publication of his own A Text Book of Dialectical Materialism (1939), which showed his tutor’s influence; secondly, in the persistent rumours that Wittgenstein was working for the Russians in England, and that Guest was one of his contacts. The haden-Guest family continues to make its mark in unexpected fields; David’s nephew, christopher Guest, is the film-maker and actor behind This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show.
First edition. This work first appeared in 1921 in the German Annalen der naturphilosophie as ‘Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung’ and was revised and translated for this, its first appearance in English, by Wittgenstein himself. it was the
only full-length philosophical book published by Wittgenstein in his lifetime. its tersely aphoristic style has become famous as much for its difficulty as for its absolute though paradoxical consistency with Wittgenstein’s thesis: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent” (p. 27). his central view, that propositions are pictures of reality, became one of the most influential, if contentious, ideas in the philosophy of language. At the heart of his philosophy lies a vision of a system of inexpressible logical relationships beyond language’s reach, an idea which still underpins much of the work in this field today.
287. WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig Josef Johann. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1953.
£798
8vo. original blue cloth with green wrapper; pp. v - xe, 1 - 232e, errata slip; a little sunning to spine, internally very clean indeed, very good.
287
First edition. Translated by G.E. Anscombe, printed in German and English parallel texts. This is probably Wittgenstein’s most significant work and one of the most important books on philosophy of the twentieth century. The work does not present a problem and solution, in the manner of most philosophical books; instead it draws the reader into active participation in thought games and experiments. This means that, while the reader is encouraged to reach their own conclusions, Wittgenstein’s argument is obscure. This is, of course, the author’s point entirely; Philosophical investigations is engaged with the gaps between language and meaning, and postulates that meaning is defined by use rather than by reference to an object or a mental image. Wittgenstein here turns away from his own ground-breaking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which argued for a logical underpinning to language, and in so doing makes a critique of all traditional philosophy and of systematic theory in general: “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, nor deduces anything.— Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain”. (proposition 126, page 50e).
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