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Books
Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger
This issue we travel back in time in Germany, as Leonid Bilmes uses words and symbols to consider the words and symbols of four famous ‘Weimar magicians’.
Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians (2020) is not only a vivid portrait of the lives of four very different thinkers and an incisive analysis of their ideas, but also a kind of biographical album showing surprising correspondences between them. For readers already familiar with these twentieth-century philosophers’ lives and work, herein lies this book’s principal interest.
The four, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger, had one thing in common: the belief that mistaken assumptions about language are the wellsprings of error in philosophy. For each thinker, the first task of philosophy is to refine our picture of language by questioning inherited assumptions about its uses and purpose, because to do so is the only way to address philosophy’s biggest questions.
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