Abstract
In the preface to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus there is a well-known sentence in which he refuses any obligation to assign the sources of his thought; so he has been thought ‘ahistorical’ and even culpably ignorant. Even in that preface, however, he owns his indebtedness to Russell and Frege; and though he read few philosophical works, he read certain works often and intensively: I remember on his book-shelves William James’s Principals of Psychology, a German-language selection from Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Augustine’s Confessions, and Frege’s Grundlagen. So he is no precedent for anybody who would neglect the great thinkers of the past.
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Reference
Robinson, Richard: 1953, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Second Edition), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Geach, P. (1991). History of Philosophy. In: Lewis, H.A. (eds) Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters. Synthese Library, vol 213. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7885-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7885-1_3
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