Recommended reading for ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #6
Ludwig Wittgenstein, St. Thomas Aquinas and Soren Kierkegaard

David Edmonds & John Eidinow. Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. New York: Ecco, 2002.
This is a fun, unique little intellectual enterprise (not unlike Action Philosophers, come to think of it) that explores, in minutest detail, a confrontation between Luki and the anti-totalitarian philosopher Karl Popper at Cambridge's Moral Science Club in 1946 in which the famously hot headed Luki supposedly threatened his colleague with a poker from the fireplace. While I was annoyed by the narrative's bouncing back-and-forth through time, presumably a device to drag out the climax of what was, literally, a ten minute squabble, the authors do a great job of invoking the turn-of-the-century Vienna milieu into which both thinkers were born, as well as setting up what was at stake in the argument: Popper despised Wittgenstein's dismissal of philosophical problems as, essentially, preferring frivolous "language games" to solving the real ethical dilemmas posed by fascism and Stalinism.

This suggests, I would argue, that Popper missed the point of Wittgenstein's ideas entirely, and if the authors falter anywhere it's in getting across the sublime depth of Luki's thought. For that I would direct readers to the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus itself. Its staggered, numbered propositions lend themselves perfectly to hypertext format, and software engineer Oliver Smith hosts just such a "Hyper Tractatus" at his web site.

Peter Kreeft. (ed.) A Shorter Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica Edited and Explained. Translated from the Latin by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920). San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.
Hey, I'll admit, I was raised Dutch Presbyterian, so I didn't understand this until I started this series: The Catholic Church really thinks it knows everything, doesn't it? I mean: Everything. The Vatican has a snappy answer for every question about life, the universe, and you-know-what, and even for the answers that contradict each other.

I bring this up not just because of the amount of mail we receive from Catholics "solving" various philosophical problems posed by this comic through some pithy piece of Church wisdom, but because, while Kreeft does a great service to us geniuses-on-the-go by condensing Aquinas's voluminous Summa down to a breezily readable 161 pages (down from Kreeft's earlier edition, Summa of the Summa, which was 500), it also boasts the most condescending footnotes I've ever read, in which the editor expounds about how Aquinas's arguments are unassailable, the saint is the greatest thinker ever, and today's modern (you know, post-Medieval) philosophers are idiots.

Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Translated from the Danish by Walter Lowrie. Garden City: Doubleday, 1954.
This is as tepid a recommendation as you'll find in this column, since I find reading Kierkegaard torture landing somewhere between getting my eyelids peeled off and reading Derrida (see above). Kierkegaard was one of Wittgenstein's favorite philosophers, though I don't see why, since Luki's opinion of the guy is the same as mine: "He is too long-winded; he keeps on saying the same thing over and over again. When I read him I always wanted to say, 'Oh all right, I agree, I agree, but please get on with it.'"

There's no better example of what Wittgy's talking about than this book-length examination of the first three paragraphs of Genesis, chapter 22, in which God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, but then - Psych! - sets a bush on fire to show Abe he's been Punk'd.

What do I know, maybe it sounds better in Danish...