Product Description: This is a concise and readable study of five intertwined themes at the heart of Wittgenstein's thought, written by one of his most eminent interpreters. David Pears offers penetrating investigations and lucid explications of some of the most influential and yet puzzling writings of twentieth-century philosophy...read more

Product Description: A stellar group of philosophers offer new works on themes from the great philosophy of Wittgenstein, honoring one of his most eminent interpreters David Pears. This collection covers both the early and the later work of Wittgenstein, relating it to current debates in philosophy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book is about self-deception and lack of self-control or wishful thinking and acting against one's own better judgement. Steering a course between the skepticism of philosophers, who find the conscious defiance of reason too paradoxical, and the tolerant empiricism of psychologists, it compares the two kinds of irrationality, and relates the conclusions drawn to the views of Freud, cognitive psychologists, and such philosophers as Aristotle, Anscombe, Hare and Davidson...read more

Product Description: In this compelling analysis David Pears examines the foundations of Hume's theory of the mind as presented in the first book of the Treatise. Past studies have tended to take one of two extreme views: that Hume relies exclusively on a theory of meaning, or that he relies exclusively on a theory of truth and evidence...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This is the second volume of David Pears's acclaimed study of Wittgenstein's philosophy from the Notebooks and the Tractatus to Philosophical Investigations and other later writings. Dealing with writings from 1929 onward, Volume II provides close discussions of those doctrines and ideas that reveal the general overall structure of Wittgenstein's thought. Designed to fill the gap in the secondary literature between brief introductions and long commentaries, The False Prison relates the general to the particular within a clearly delineated framework, making Wittgenstein's difficult thought more accessible to philosophy students and nonspecialists.

An explanation of various facets of Wittgenstein's early and later philosophies