Abstract

Levi's “Biographical Sources of Wittgenstein's Ethics” argues that Wittgenstein was a man deeply marked by “guilty homosexuality” and that this resulted in his philosophical expulsion of ultimate moral judgement from meaningful human discourse. Of course, as Levi himself points out, there are many additional considerations that could and should be brought to bear on this thesis. Levi, however, chooses to concentrate on Wittgenstein's individual psychology, largely leaving aside the sociological and historical factors in which, for example, Janik and Toulmin's work on Wittgenstein's Vienna concentrates. On the other hand, neither Levi nor Wittgenstein's Vienna deals with the role of Wittgenstein's typically alienated and uncomfortably acculturated Jewishness, to which Engelmann's Letters pays more adequate attention.