This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de siecle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a (...) classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein s native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems .This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful. New York Times Book Review.". (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, paintings, films, musical compositions, titles of books -- and even novels. In his splendid biography, Ray Monk has made this very compelling human being come alive in a way that perfectly explains the fascination he has evoked. Wittgenstein's life was one of great moral (...) and spiritual depth. Although his work addresses problems of logic, language, mind, and knowledge, he often described it as having an ethical point, and once said that he "could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." In successfully bridging the gap assumed by many to exist between Wittgenstein's life and his work, Monk's biography helps to explain the interest in Wittgenstein's later philosophy on the part of Buddhist scholars. (shrink)

Intellectual diary of a thinker of the school of Logical Positivism showing the day-by-day development of his philosophical ideas.

Since the first publication of Insight and Illusion in l972, a wealth of Wittgenstein's writings has become accessible. Accordingly, in this edition Professor Hacker has rewritten six of his eleven original chapters and revised the others to incorporate the new abundant material.Insight and Illusion now fully clarifies the historical backgrounds of Wittgenstein's highly differing masterpices, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and traces the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought. Hacker explains all of Wittgenstein's writings in detail, focusing on his critique of metaphysics, (...) his famous "private language argument," and his account of self consciousness. (shrink)

: Before he studied philosophy under Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein was trained as an engineer at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. He then worked as a graduate research engineer at the University of Manchester, where he designed a variable volume combustion chamber and received a patent for an innovative propeller design in 1911. I argue that the methodology of contemporary aeronautical engineering research, involving the systematic use of experiments and scale models, affected the Bild theory of language in the Tractatus (...) Logico-Philosophicus. The principle of similitude, underlying the mathematical resolution of scale effect problems associated with wind tunnel research on models, is reflected in the law of projection in the Tractatus. (shrink)