Ludwig Wittgenstein

Front Cover
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 419 pages
In the safety of his manuscripts, Ludwig Wittgenstein was free to endlessly revise, rework and reframe his philosophical thoughts. Thus his published work yields a glimpse of just a small portion of Wittgenstein's philosophical thought--the portion that eventually appeared in print. Yet for Wittgenstein, philosophy was an on-going activity, a process. Only in his dialog with the philosophical community and in his private moments does Wittgenstein's philosophical practice fully come to light. Those public and private occasions are collected here. In Private Occasions, co-editor Alfred Nordmann presents Wittgenstein's diaries from the 1930s to an English audience for the first time. They are accompanied by Wittgenstein's letters to and from friend Ludwig H nsel. Together, they reveal a great deal about Wittgenstein, who himself says "The movement of thought in my philosophizing should be discernible also in the history of my mind." In Public Occasions, James Klagge collects Wittgenstein's papers and speeches, some newly published, from a number of forums, including his lectures at Cambridge and his involvement with the Cambridge Moral Science Club. Much of Wittgenstein's philosophical work came through, or in the form of, dialogs, making these public encounters particularly valuable. The result of this collaboration, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, is a thorough look at the philosophy of one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers that goes beyond a mere study of his published work.
 

Contents

A Friendship 19291940
257
The Wittgenstein Lectures
331
1930 and 1940
373
Summer 1941
381
Popper and Wittgenstein Fall 1946
397
Addendum to von Wrights The Wittgenstein Papers
407
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Born in Vienna, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was educated at Linz and Berlin University. In 1908 he went to England, registering as a research student in engineering at the University of Manchester. There he studied Bertrand Russell's (see also Vol. 5) Principles of Mathematics by chance and decided to study with Russell at Cambridge University. From 1912 to 1913, he studied under Russell's supervision and began to develop the ideas that crystallized in his Tractatus. With the outbreak of World War I, he returned home and volunteered for the Austrian Army. During his military service, he prepared the book published in 1921 as the Tractatus, first translated into English in 1922 by C. K. Ogden. Wittgenstein emerged as a philosopher whose influence spread from Austria to the English-speaking world. Perhaps the most eminent philosopher during the second half of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein had an early impact on the members of the Vienna Circle, with which he was associated. The logical atomism of the Tractatus, with its claims that propositions of logic and mathematics are tautologous and that the cognitive meaning of other sorts of scientific statements is empirical, became the fundamental source of logical positivism, or logical empiricism. Bertrand Russell adopted it as his position, and A. J. Ayer was to accept and profess it 15 years later. From the end of World War I until 1926, Wittgenstein was a schoolteacher in Austria. In 1929 his interest in philosophy renewed, and he returned to Cambridge, where even G. E. Moore came under his spell. At Cambridge Wittgenstein began a new wave in philosophical analysis distinct from the Tractatus, which had inspired the rise of logical positivism. Whereas the earlier Wittgenstein had concentrated on the formal structures of logic and mathematics, the later Wittgenstein attended to the fluidities of ordinary language. His lectures, remarks, conversations, and letters made lasting imprints on the minds of his most brilliant students, who have long since initiated the unending process of publishing them. During his lifetime Wittgenstein himself never published another book after the Tractatus. However, he was explicit that the work disclosing the methods and topics of his later years be published. This work, Philosophical Investigations (1953), is esteemed to be his most mature expression of his philosophical method and thought.