Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book: This small volume conveys a vibrant sense of the life of philosophy. With intellectual honesty reminiscent of Augustine’s Confessions, we see a mind relentlessly unearthing previously unexamined presuppositions, exposing misleading conceptual models that would oversimplify language, and sustaining a self-analytical scrutiny concerning its own inward impulsions to take wrong turns, to oversimplify, to stop thinking too quickly. But it also intimates much more: we see Wittgenstein forging in the rough a capacious vision of linguistic life, one leading to his great masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations. [recommended by Garry Hagberg, Bard College]