Ludwig Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889
– April 29, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed
several groundbreaking works to modern philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic
and the philosophy of language. He is widely regarded
as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.
Although numerous collections from Wittgenstein's notebooks, papers, and lectures have been published since his death, he
published only one philosophical book in his own lifetime — the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
in 1921, while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the supervision of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. With the completion of the Tractatus, for which he
was awarded a Ph.D., Wittgenstein believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy, and he abandoned his studies, working as
a schoolteacher, a gardener at a monastery, and an architect on his sister's new house in Vienna. However, in 1929, he returned to Cambridge and took a teaching position there, subsequently revising some of his earlier work. His development of
a new philosophical method and a new understanding of language culminated in his second magnum opus, the Philosophical Investigations, which was published posthumously.
Wittgenstein's early work was deeply influenced by Russell's work on logic, by his
earlier brief study with the German logician Gottlob Frege, and by Arthur
Schopenhauer. When the Tractatus was published, it was taken up as a major influence by the Vienna Circle positivists. However, Wittgenstein did not consider himself part of
that school and alleged that logical positivism involved grave
misunderstandings of the Tractatus.
Both his early and later work have been major influences in the development of analytic philosophy, especially in the philosophy of language, the philosophy
of mind, and action theory. Former students and colleagues who
carried on Wittgenstein's methods included Gilbert Ryle, Friedrich
Waismann, Norman Malcolm, G. E. M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, Georg Henrik von Wright and Peter Geach.
Contemporary philosophers heavily influenced by Wittgenstein include James Conant, Michael Dummett, Peter Hacker, Stanley Cavell,
and Saul Kripke.
Life
He was born as Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein in Vienna. His paternal
grandparents, after they had converted from Judaism to Protestantism, moved from Saxony in Germany to Vienna in
Austria-Hungary. Here is where Ludwig's father, Karl
Wittgenstein, gained wealth and esteem as one of the leading businessmen in the iron and
steel industry. Ludwig's mother Leopoldine (née Kalmus) was a Catholic, but her father was also of Jewish descent. Ludwig was baptized in a Catholic church and was given a
Catholic burial by his friends when he died, although he was not a practising Catholic.
Early life
Ludwig grew up as the youngest of eight children in a household that provided an intensely stimulating environment. Ludwig's
parents were both very musical and all their children were artistically and intellectually gifted. Karl Wittgenstein was a
leading patron of the arts, and the Wittgenstein house hosted many figures of high culture
— above all, musicians. The family was often visited by artists such as Johannes Brahms and
Gustav Mahler. Ludwig's brother Paul Wittgenstein went on to become a world-famous concert pianist, even after losing his right arm in World War I. Ludwig
himself did not have prodigious musical talent, but his devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life
— he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his philosophical writings, and was said to be unusually adept
at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages. A less fortunate family trait was a tendency to intense self-criticism, to
the point of depression and suicidal tendencies. Three of his four brothers committed suicide.
Until 1903, Ludwig was educated at home; after that, he began three years of schooling at the Realschule in Linz, a school emphasizing technical topics. Adolf Hitler was a student there at the same time, and the two (both 14) can be seen near each other in a
school photograph of all the students. (It is a matter of controversy whether Hitler and Wittgenstein knew each other at all, and
if so whether either had any memory of the other. See below.)
In 1906, Ludwig took up studying mechanical
engineering in Berlin, and in 1908 he went to the University of Manchester to study for his doctorate in engineering. For this purpose he registered as a
research student in an engineering laboratory. There he did research on the behavior of kites in the upper atmosphere. From that he moved to aeronautical research on the design
of a propeller with small jet engines on the end of its blades. He successfully designed and tested a prototype of this
design.
During his research Wittgenstein became interested in the foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics.
He studied in Germany briefly under Gottlob Frege who, in the
preceding decades, had laid the foundations of modern mathematical logic. Frege urged him to read the work of Bertrand Russell, who had discovered certain crucial contradictions in
Frege's own theories.
In 1912, Wittgenstein went to the University of
Cambridge and studied with Russell at Trinity College. He made a
great impression on Russell and G. E. Moore and started to work on the
foundations of logic and mathematical logic. During this period, his three major interests were philosophy, music and travelling.
He was also invited to join the elite secret society, the Cambridge Apostles, which Russell and Moore had both belonged to as
students.
In 1913, Wittgenstein inherited a great fortune when his father died. He donated some of it, initially anonymously, to
Austrian artists and writers including Rainer Maria Rilke and
Georg Trakl. In 1914 he would go to see Trakl when the latter wanted to meet
his benefactor, but Trakl killed himself days before Wittgenstein arrived.
Although he was invigorated by his study in Cambridge and his conversations
with Russell, Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by
other academics. In 1913, he retreated to the solitude of a remote mountain cabin in Skjolden, Norway, which could only be reached on horseback. The isolation allowed him to devote himself entirely to his work,
and he later saw this period as one of the most passionate and productive times of his life. While there, he wrote a
ground-breaking work in the foundations of logic, a book entitled Logik, which was the immediate predecessor and source of
much of the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus.
World War I
The outbreak of World War I in the next year took him completely by
surprise, as he was living a secluded life at the time. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army as a private soldier, first serving on a ship and then in an artillery workshop. In 1916, he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front where he won several medals for
bravery. The diary entries of this time reflect his contempt for the baseness, as he saw it, of his fellow soldiers.
Throughout the war, Wittgenstein kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical and religious reflections alongside
personal remarks. At the beginning of his tour of duty, Wittgenstein devoured Tolstoy's commentary on the Gospels, and became a devoted, if
troubled and doubting, Christian. Wittgenstein's work on Logik began
to take on an ethical and religious significance. With this new concern with the ethical, combined with his earlier interest in
logical analysis, and with key insights developed during the war (such as the so-called "picture theory" of propositions),
Wittgenstein's work from Cambridge and Norway was transfigured into the material that
eventually became the Tractatus. In 1918, toward the end of the war, Wittgenstein was promoted to reserve officer
(Lieutenant) and sent to north Italy as part of an artillery regiment where he was
captured by the Italians. When he was taken prisoner, the Italians found a German manuscript entitled the
Logische-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise) in his rucksack. This manuscript would eventually
become the Tractatus. Through the intervention of his Cambridge friends, Wittgenstein managed to get access to books,
prepare his manuscript, and send it back to England. Russell recognized it as a work
of supreme philosophical importance, and after Wittgenstein's release in 1919, he worked with Wittgenstein to get it published.
An English translation was prepared, first by Frank Ramsey and then by C. K.
Ogden, with Wittgenstein's involvement. After some discussion of how best to translate the title, G. E. Moore suggested Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Russell wrote an
introduction, lending the book his reputation as one of the foremost philosophers in the world.
However, difficulties remained. Wittgenstein had become personally disaffected with Russell, and he was displeased with
Russell's introduction, which he thought evinced fundamental misunderstandings of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein grew
frustrated as interested publishers proved difficult to find. To add insult to injury, those publishers who were
interested proved to be mainly interested in the book because of Russell's introduction. At last, Wittgenstein found a publisher
in Wilhelm Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, which printed a German edition in 1921, and in Routledge Kegan
Paul, which printed a bilingual edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation in 1922.
The "lost years": life after the Tractatus
At the same time, Wittgenstein was a profoundly changed man: he became a passionate convert to Christianity, faced harrowing
combat in World War I, and succeeded in crystallizing the upheavals in his intellectual and emotional life with the exhausting
composition of the Tractatus. It was a work which transfigured all of his past work on logic into a radically new
framework that he believed offered a definitive solution to all the problems of philosophy. These changes in
Wittgenstein's inner and outer life left him both haunted and yet invigorated to follow a new, ascetic life. One of the most
dramatic expressions of this change was his decision to give away his portion of the family fortune that he had inherited when
his father had died. Some of the main beneficiaries were avant-garde German and Austrian artists (among them Rainer Maria Rilke). He also gave much of it to his siblings, insisting
that they promise never to give it back. He felt that giving money to the poor could only corrupt them further; the rich would
not be harmed by it.
Since Wittgenstein thought that the Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, he left philosophy and
returned to Austria to train as a primary school teacher. He was educated in the
methods of the Austrian School Reform Movement which advocated the stimulation of the natural curiosity of
children and their development as independent thinkers, instead of just letting them memorize facts. Wittgenstein was
enthusiastic about these ideas but ran into problems when he was appointed as an elementary teacher in the rural Austrian
villages of Trattenbach, Puchberg-am-Schneeberg, and Otterthal. During his
time as a schoolteacher, Wittgenstein wrote a pronunciation and spelling dictionary for his use in teaching students; it was
published and well-received by his colleagues. This would be the only book besides the Tractatus that Wittgenstein
published in his lifetime.
Wittgenstein's teaching methods were intense and exacting, and his students enjoyed a level of education very rarely available
in impoverished rural schools. However, Wittgenstein had very little patience for his slower students, and his severe
disciplinary methods (often involving corporal punishment) — as well as a general suspicion amongst the villagers that he
was somewhat mad — led to a long series of bitter disagreements with some of his students' parents. During this period,
Wittgenstein was prone to miserable bouts of depression. In April 1926, he resigned his position and returned to Vienna, feeling
that he had failed as a school teacher.
After that, he worked as a gardener's assistant in a monastery near Vienna. He considered becoming a monk, and went so far as
to enquire about the requirements for joining an order. However, at the interview he was advised that he could not find in
monastic life what he sought.
Two major developments helped to save Wittgenstein from this despairing state. The first was an invitation from his sister
Margaret ("Gretl") Stoneborough to work on the design and construction of her new house. He worked with the architect, Paul Engelmann (who became a close
friend of Wittgenstein's during the war), and the two designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos (whom they both greatly admired). Wittgenstein found the work intellectually
absorbing, and exhausting — he poured himself into the design in painstaking detail, including even small aspects such as
doorknobs and radiators (which had to be exactly positioned to maintain the symmetry of the rooms). As a work of modernist
architecture the house evoked some high praise; G. H. von
Wright said that it possessed the same "static beauty" as the Tractatus. The effort of totally involving himself in
intellectual work once again did much to restore Wittgenstein's spirits.
Secondly, toward the end of his work on the house, Wittgenstein was contacted by Moritz Schlick, one of the leading figures of the newly-formed Vienna Circle. The Tractatus had been tremendously influential to the development of the Vienna
positivism, and although Schlick never succeeded in drawing Wittgenstein into the discussions of the Vienna Circle itself, he and
some of his fellow circle members (especially Friedrich Waismann) met occasionally with Wittgenstein to discuss philosophical topics. Wittgenstein was
frequently frustrated by these meetings — he believed that Schlick and his colleagues had fundamentally misunderstood the
Tractatus, and at times would refuse to talk about it at all. (Much of the disagreements concerned the importance of
religious life and the mystical; Wittgenstein considered these matters of a sort of wordless faith, whereas the positivists
disdained them as useless. In one meeting, Wittgenstein refused to discuss the Tractatus at all, and sat with his back to
his guests while he read aloud from the poetry of Rabindranath
Tagore.) Nevertheless, the contact with the Vienna Circle stimulated Wittgenstein intellectually and revived his interest in
philosophy. He also met with Frank P. Ramsey, a young philosopher of
mathematics who travelled several times from Cambridge to Austria to meet with Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. In the course
of his conversations with the Vienna Circle and with Ramsey, Wittgenstein began to think that there might be some "grave
mistakes" in his work as presented in the Tractatus — marking the beginning of a second career of ground-breaking
philosophical work, which would occupy him for the rest of his life.
Returning to Cambridge
In 1929 he decided, at the urging of Ramsey and others, to return to Cambridge. He was met at the train station by a crowd of
England's greatest intellectuals, discovering rather to his horror that he was one of the most famed philosophers in the world.
In a letter to Lydia Lopokova, Lord Keynes wrote: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on
the 5.15 train."
Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge, as he did not have a degree, so he applied as an advanced
undergraduate. Russell noted that his previous residency was in fact sufficient for a doctoral degree, and urged him to offer the
Tractatus as a doctoral thesis, which he did in 1929. It was
examined by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defense, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said,
"Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." Moore commented in the examiner's report to the effect that: "In my opinion
this is a work of genius; it is, in any case, up to the standards of a degree from Cambridge." Wittgenstein was appointed as a
lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College.
Wittgenstein's political sympathies lay on the left, and while he was opposed to
Marxist theory, he described himself as a "communist at heart" and romanticized the
life of labourers. In 1934, attracted by Keynes' description of Soviet life in Short
View of Russia, he conceived the idea of emigrating to the Soviet Union
with his close friend (or lover) Francis Skinner. They took lessons
in Russian and in 1935 Wittgenstein traveled to Leningrad and Moscow in an attempt to secure employment. He was offered teaching
positions but preferred manual work and returned three weeks later.
From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, leaving Skinner behind. He worked on the Philosophical
Investigations. In the winter of 1936/37, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most of them about minor
infractions, in an effort to cleanse himself.
After G. E. Moore's resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein, who was by then considered a philosophical genius, was appointed to the
chair in Philosophy at Cambridge. He acquired British citizenship soon afterwards.
After exhausting philosophical work, Wittgenstein would often relax by watching an American western or reading detective stories.
These tastes are in stark contrast to his preferences in music, where he rejected anything after Brahms as a symptom of the decay
of society.
By then, Wittgenstein's view on the foundations
of mathematics had changed considerably. Earlier, he had thought that logic could provide a solid foundation, and he had even
considered updating Russell and Whitehead's Principia
Mathematica. Now he denied that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and that mathematical statements were
"true" in any real sense: they simply expressed the conventional established meanings of certain symbols. He also denied that a
contradiction should count as a fatal flaw of a mathematical system. He
gave a series of lectures which were attended by Alan Turing and in which the
two argued vigorously about these matters.
During a period in World War II he left Cambridge and volunteered as a
hospital porter in Guy's Hospital in London and as a laboratory
assistant in Newcastle upon Tyne's Royal Victoria Infirmary.
This was arranged by his friend John Ryle, a brother of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who was working at the hospital then. Wittgenstein taught at
Cambridge until 1947 when he resigned to concentrate on his writing. He never liked the intellectual's life at Cambridge, and in
fact he encouraged several of his students to pursue non-academic careers. There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, that if any of
his philosophy students expressed an interest in pursing the subject, he would ban them from attending any more of his
classes.
Wittgenstein communicated with the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, who succeeded Wittgenstein as professor at the University of
Cambridge.
Although Wittgenstein was involved in a relationship to Marguerite Respinger (a young Swiss woman whom he had met as a friend
of the family), his plans to marry Marguerite were broken off in 1931, and Wittgenstein never married. Most of his romantic
attachments were to young men. There is considerable debate over how active Wittgenstein's homosexual life was--inspired by W. W. Bartley's claim to have found evidence of several casual liaisons during Wittgenstein's time in Vienna.
What is clear, in any case, is that Wittgenstein had several long-term homosexual attachments, including an infatuation with his
friend David Pinsent and
long-term, active affairs with Francis Skinner and Ben Richardson.
Much of Wittgenstein's later work was done in the rural isolation that he preferred, on the west coast of Ireland. By 1949,
when he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer, he had written most of the material that would be published after his death as
Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), which arguably contains his most important work. He
spent the last two years of his life working in Vienna, the United States, Oxford, and Cambridge. He worked continuously on new
material, inspired by the conversations that he had had with his friend and former student Norman Malcolm, during a long vacation at the Malcolms' house in the United States. Malcolm had been wrestling with G.E. Moore's
commonsense response to external world skepticism
("Here is one hand, and here is another; therefore I know at least two external things exist"). Wittgenstein began to work on
another series of remarks inspired by his conversations, which he continued to work on until two days before his death; the
remarks would be collected and published posthumously as On Certainty.
The only known fragment of music composed by Wittgenstein was premiered in November 2003. It is a powerful passage of music that lasts less than half a minute. Wittgenstein died in
Cambridge in 1951, just a few days before his friends arrived to pay their last respects. His last words were "Tell them I've had
a wonderful life."
Work
The Tractatus
Main article: Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus
In rough order, the first half of the book sets forth the following theses: the world consists of independent atomic facts
— existing states of affairs — out of which larger facts are built. Language consists of atomic, and then
larger-scale propositions that correspond to these facts by sharing the same
"logical form." Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts. We can analyse
our thoughts and sentences to express ('express' as in show, not say) their true logical form. Those we cannot so
analyse cannot be meaningfully discussed. Philosophy consists of no more than this form of analysis: "Wovon man nicht sprechen
kann, darueber muss man schweigen" — whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.
Some commentators believe that, although no other type of discourse is, properly speaking, philosophy, Wittgenstein does imply
that those things to be passed over "in silence" may be important or useful, according to some of his more cryptic propositions
in the last sections of the Tractatus: indeed, may be the most important and most useful. Other commentators point out
that the sentences of the Tractatus would not qualify as meaningful according to its own rigid criteria, and that
Wittgenstein's method in the book does not follow its own demands regarding the only strictly correct philosophical method. These
commentators believe that the book is deeply ironical, and that it demonstrates the ultimate nonsensicality of any sentence
attempting to say something philosophical, something about those fixations of philosophers, about those things that must be
passed over in silence, and about logic.
Intermediary works
Wittgenstein wrote copiously after his return to Cambridge, and arranged much of his writing into an array of incomplete
manuscripts. Some thirty thousand pages existed at the time of his death. Much, but by no means all, of this has been sorted and
released in several volumes. During his "middle work" in the 1920s and 1930s, much of his work involved attacks from various
angles on the sort of philosophical perfectionism embodied in the Tractatus. Of this work, Wittgenstein published only a
single paper, "Remarks on Logical Form," which was submitted to be read for the Aristotelian Society and published in their
proceedings. By the time of the conference, however, Wittgenstein had repudiated the essay as worthless, and gave a talk on the
concept of infinity instead. Wittgenstein was increasingly frustrated to find that, although he was not yet ready to publish his
work, some other philosophers were beginning to publish essays containing inaccurate presentations of his own views based on
their conversations with him. As a result, he published a very brief letter to the journal Mind, taking a recent article
by R. B. Braithwaite as
a case in point, and asked philosophers to hold off writing about his views until he was himself ready to publish them. Although
unpublished, the Blue Book, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934 contains seeds of
Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language (later developed in the Investigations), and is widely read today as a turning point in
his philosophy of language.
The Philosophical Investigations
Main article: Philosophical
Investigations
Although the Tractatus is a major work of philosophy, it is for the Philosophical Investigations (PI) (known as
Philosophische Untersuchungen in German) that Wittgenstein is best known today. Published posthumously in 1953, PI
comprises two parts. Part I, consisting of 693 numbered paragraphs, which was ready for printing in 1946 but was withdrawn from
the publisher by Wittgenstein, and Part II which was added on by the editors, trustees of his estate.
It is notoriously difficult to find consensus among interpreters of Wittgenstein's work, and this is particularly true
concerning PI. What follows, then, is but one of many readings to be found. In PI, Wittgenstein presents an analysis of our use
of language which he sees as crucial to the carrying out of philosophical research. In brief, Wittgenstein describes language as
a set of language-games within which the words of our language function and receive their meaning. This view of meaning
as use represents a break from the classical view, also presented by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, of meaning as
representation.
One of the most radical characteristics of "later" Wittgenstein is his view of the task of philosophy. The "conventional" view
of philosophy, accepted by almost every Western philosopher since Plato, is that the philosopher's task was to solve a number of
seemingly intractable problems using logical analysis (for example, the problem of "free will", the relationship between "mind"
and "matter", what is "the good" or "the beautiful" and so on). However, Wittgenstein argued in PI that these "problems" were in
fact pseudo-problems that arose from philosopher's misuse of language. Wittgenstein's new philosophical methodology was to
continually remind the philosopher of the facts of linguistic usage that they had forgotten in their search for abstract
"truths". It would then become obvious that the great questions posed by philosophers had arisen because they presupposed a
mistaken view of language and its relation to reality. Philosophers in the Western tradition were not "wiser" than anyone else,
as had been assumed — they were simply ordinary men and women more likely to entrap themselves in linguistic confusion. The
task of the true philosopher (i.e. Wittgenstein) was to "show the fly out of the fly bottle": to show that the problems with
which philosophers tormented themselves were in fact not really problems at all, but rather were examples of "language gone on
holiday," as he put it. So the true philosopher becomes more like a therapist removing distress and confusion than someone who
creates or discusses philosophical theories or positions.
Needless to say, this viewpoint has not been popular amongst academic philosophers, and Wittgenstein's position in
philosophical history is ambiguous. He is generally regarded as a great philosopher, perhaps the greatest since Immanuel Kant (or even Plato), and yet in
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s his work was unfashionable. However, with the decline of pure analytic philosophy and the continued lack of
progress on traditional philosophical problems, his stock seems to be rising again.
Later work
- "On Certainty" — A collection of aphorisms discussing the relation between knowledge and certainty, extremely
influential in the philosophy of action.
- "Remarks on Colour"
Important publications
- Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14 (1921)
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C.K. Ogden (1922)
- Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953)
- Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe (1953)
- Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, ed. by G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe (1956) (a
selection from his writings on the philosophy of logic and mathematics between 1937 and 1944)
- Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, rev. ed. (1978)
- The Blue and Brown Books (1958) (Notes dictated in English to Cambridge students in 1933-35)
- Philosophische Bemerkungen, ed. by Rush Rhees (1964)
- Philosophical Remarks (1975)
Quotations
- Proposition 6.54 from the Tractatus: "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally
recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the
ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) ... He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly." This conception
is sometimes referred to as "Wittgenstein's Ladder".
- The final proposition from the Tractatus, numbered 7: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" An
alternative translation sometimes quoted is: "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent"
- From the introduction to the Tractatus: "...the aim of this book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather — not
to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both
sides of the limit thinkable..."
- The later Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
- "Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
- "If one tries to advance 'theses' (i.e. theories) in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone
would agree to them."
- "The answer to every philosophical question is a truism."
- "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything."
- Philosophical Investigations § 281 "But doesn't what you say come to this: that there is no pain, for example, without
pain-behaviour? It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one
say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious."
Works about Wittgenstein
- In The Jew of Linz,
Kimberly Cornish attempted
to show that not only did the young Wittgenstein and Hitler know each other, but also that they hated each other, that the "one
Jewish boy" from his schooling days at Linz that Hitler refers to in Mein
Kampf was in fact Wittgenstein, and even that key elements of Hitler's anti-Semitic writings were in fact projections of the young Wittgenstein's traits onto the whole Jewish
people. Most biographers of Wittgenstein contend that Cornish's evidence is thin (most of the arguments adduced in favor of the
claim are based on circumstantial associations and speculation), and hold that there is little evidence that Hitler and
Wittgenstein knew each other, and none at all for the more sensational claims that there was a personal antagonism between them,
or that Hitler's personal hatred of Wittgenstein shaped the course of Nazi anti-Semitism. E. L. Doctorow treats Wittgenstein and Hitler as classmates in sections of his novel City of God, in which he writes as Wittgenstein. However, while Wittgenstein and
Hitler were the same age, they were two grades apart at the Realschule--Hitler had been held back one year and
Wittgenstein had been advanced one year.
References
- Ray Monk: Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, 1990. A biography that also attempts to explain his philosophy.
ISBN 0140159959
- Norman Malcolm: Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir, 1958. A moving portrait by someone who knew Wittgenstein well. ISBN 0199247595
- Drury, Maurice O'Connor The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein, 1973. A collection of Drury's writings
concerning Wittgenstein. Edited by David Berman, Michael Fitzgerald, and John Hayes. Edited and introduced by David Berman,
Michael Fitzgerald and John Hayes. ASIN 1855064901
- David Edmonds and John Eidinow: Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great
Philosophers, 2001 . ISBN
0066212448
- Hans-Johann Glock: A Wittgenstein Dictionary, 1996.
External links
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