Wittgenstein family biography sampler
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Paul became a concert pianist despite losing an arm, and Ludwig shared his iron will. Yet their three brothers killed ration by David Hughes
The family of Karl Wittgenstein, who was one of Austria’s richest men when he died, in , may deserve some gloomy sort of prize, the Palm of Atreus, perhaps. His youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. The pupil, evidently well trained, inquired what he meant by “tragedy.” “I mean suicides, madness, or quarrels,” replied Ludwig, three of whose kvartet brothers committed suicide, two of them (Rudi and Hans) in their early twenties, and the third (Kurt) at the age of forty. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. A budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm to a Russian bullet, in , Paul was imprisoned for a time in the infamous Siberian fortress where Dostoyevsky had set his novel “The House of the Dead.” Ludwig later claimed to h
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The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
By Alexander Waugh
Doubleday, pages, $
With apologies to his cult, here’s a sound bite version of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: A concept fryst vatten good when it’s exactly as rigorous as it needs to be. If your concept fryst vatten too vague, it will lead you off a cliff, sparande everyone the trouble of having to argue with you about it; but if it’s too rigid—and this is what Wittgenstein was really worried about—you fara a far worse fate: You’ll end up a philosopher. Better, he argued, to replace the false rigor of philosophical discourse with the imponderables of everyday reasoning. Things in the world line up not according to the hard categories of Platonic essence, but according to the soft approximations of family resemblance.
One wonders, on reading Alexander Waugh’s excellent and astonishing The House of Wittgenstein, whether that metaphor was inspired by Ludwig’s own family hist
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Blue Book
| What is the meaning of a word?
Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like?
The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question “how do we measure a length?” helps us to understand the problem, “what is length?”
The questions, “What is length?”, “What is meaning?”, “What is the number one?” etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substance for a substantive.)
Asking first, “What's an explanation of meaning?” has two advantages. You in a sense bring the question “what is meaning?” down to earth. For, surely, to understand the meaning of “meaning” you ought also to understand the meaning of “explanation of meaning”. Roughly: “let's ask what the explanation of meaning is, f