Saturday, March 04, 2023

What I'm "Reading" at the Moment

The quotes around "reading" are because really I'm just having my Echo Dot read to me at bedtime.

And also because I'm not really "reading" the thing so much as Bertrand Russell's introduction to the thing, the thing being Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (that's a non-affiliate link to the free Standard Ebooks edition -- here's a non-affiliate link to the Amazon Kindle version of the Chiron Academic Press "Original Authoritative Edition" that I'm actually "reading").

The thing -- or, rather, Russell's introduction to the thing, since I'm usually asleep before that ends and the work proper begins -- is ... ambitious. I understand that Wittgenstein later recanted his view that it "had resolved all philosophical problems."

Hopefully I'll eventually get familiar enough with it to have some thoughts on where he's right (if at all) and where he's wrong (if at all).

Over the last few years I've done quite a bit of this Kindle/Alexa bedtime "reading," and I've found that it makes actual reading easier later on. A book handled this way feels familiar rather than strange, so it becomes easier to spend time with its parts instead of trying to sprint/ram my way through the thing from beginning to end.

It does bug the hell out of me that so many important books are so expensive in Kindle format even though they've been around forever. I'd like to give Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, which I read in dead-tree format on library loan maybe 25 years ago, the Kindle/Alexa treatment, but the cheapest Kindle editions are $8.49!

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