Talk:Ludwig Wittgenstein/Archive 2

message: The section on the Tractatus needs major editing. We need a presentable way of numbering Wittgenstein's propositions. Also, there are topic-placeholders in quotation marks ("") that need to be filled in. Moreover, when we are quoting Wittgenstein, do we want his remarks in quotation marks, or italicized?
Wikiwikifast 02:11, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: #The Tractatus

message: I'm curious about this sentence:
:There is evidence, however, that both appeared simultaneously in a school photograph of all the students.
Is there evidence that this photo exists, or is the photo itself evidence that both appeared simultaneously? — Matt 11:05, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Linz School photo

message: I didn't see it anywhere, but is it mentioned that ol' Ludwig was slightly authistic? He walked sideways, you know.. :D    Sigg3.net 11:11, 28 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right - its Tractatus, not Tracatus.  -Seth Mahoney 05:01, 30 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Other

message: I tagged :Image:Wittgenstein2.jpg as fairuse old, though I would have been within policy in deleting it from the unresolved listing on WP:PUI. Removal of the template noting it as a problem listed image without resolving the source or comment on WP:PUI was inappropriate. If someone has more info on the image, please add it to the image page. Thanks, -- Infrogmation 17:19, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photo 

message: The end of the section on "The Philosophical Investigations" read:
:Needless to say, this viewpoint has not been popular amongst academic philosophers, and Wittgenstein's position in philosophical history is ambiguous. He is generally regarded as a great philosopher, perhaps the greatest since Immanuel Kant (or even Plato), and yet in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s his work was unfashionable. However, with the decline of pure analytic philosophy and the continued lack of progress on traditional philosophical problems, his stock seems to be rising again.
I think there is not one clause in this paragraph worth saving, nor is there any value in this section ending on such a navel-gazing note, and so I have simply deleted it. --- Charles Stewart 20:19, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Heroically POV paragraph

message: One of Wittgenstein's more important contributions is in exploring relationships between language and 'forms of life'.  This should be noted and perhaps expanded on in the main article.
--Imagine&Engage 11:26, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language and 'forms of life' 

message: (I moved this comment here from the archive; it was posted there by mistake. Jeffrey is a new user and still learning the ropes around here; I'm doing a bit of "mentoring" for him. -- Essjay ·   Talk 09:55, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC))
I have never anywhere seen, except on Wikipedia that Ludwig Wittgenstein 'became a passionate convert to Christianity' which is the final line of the first para of biography.
I consider this either a 'serious error' or that we need sources! Please excuse if this doesn't come out quite right - it is the first time I have tried to raise an issue. Essjay can help if necessary. None of the material cited suggests either conversion, and certainly not 'passionate.' It is possible that a Dominican priest did say prayers at his grave -though Wittgenstein could hardly be considered responsible! Ray Monk's biography seems both thorough and authoritative on W.'s religious development. Incidentally, with reference to eralier discussion on this 'talk' page, Prof. Gabriel Josipovici told me that W. was well known in Oxford in the late thirties, when he became aware of what was happening in Germany, for constantly saying 'I'm a Jew' -- Jeffrey Newman
The article describes L.W. as a passionate convert on his return from World War I. This much is true and well-documented. The problem is that discussion of his religious views is not followed through his life: he was born into a family of Jewish descent, but they had converted to Christianity a couple of generations before his birth. He was baptized as a Catholic but Russell records that he was a rather militant unbeliever by the time he reached Cambridge. He (re-)converted during World War I, after reading Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, and became a passionate Christian for some years afterward. (One of the reasons for his falling out with Russell after the war involved his disdain for Russell's atheism.) He remained attracted to religious views for the rest of his life, but eventually found that he could no longer bring himself to believe them. (However, while he spent plenty of time thinking about his Jewishness, his religious leanings were, as far as I know, more or less always towards Christianity; his thought about his identity as a Jew had more to do with the cultural and political realities of Jewish life in Austria, which of course he and his family had to face during the 1930s.) On his death-bed, he was given the last rites by a Catholic priest (and he was buried in a Catholic ceremony), but this was after he had lost consciousness and was done at the behest of his Catholic friends. Here's some relevant passages from Monk's book:
: By the time they moved to Vienna in the 1850s the Wittgensteins probably no longer regarded themselves as Jewish. Hermann Christian, indeed, acquired something of a reputation as an anti-Semite, and firmly forbade his offspring to marry Jews. The family was large -- eight daughters and three sons -- nad on the whole they heeded their father's advice and married into the ranks of the Viennese Protestant professional classes. Thus was established a network of judges, lawyers, professors and clergymen which the Wittgensteins could rely on if they needed the services of any of the traditional professions. So complete was the family's assimilation that one of Hermann's daughters had to ask her brother Louis if the rumours she had heard about their Jewish origins were true. "Pur sang, Milly", he replied, "pur sang." (5)
: The mother of Karl Wittgenstein's children was Leopoldine Kalmus, whom Karl had married in 1873, at the beginning of his dramatic rise through the Kupelwieser company. In choosing her, Karl was once again proving to be the exception in his family, for Leopoldine was the only partly Jewish spouse of any of the children of Hermann Christian. However, although her father, Joseph Kalmus, was descended from a prominent Jewish family, he himself had been brought up a Catholic; her mother, Marie Stallner, was entirely 'Aryan'--the daughter of an established (Catholic) Austrian land-owning family. In fact, then (until the Nuremberg Laws were applied in Austria, at least), Karl had not married a Jewess, but a Catholic, and had thus taken a further step in the assimilation of the Wittgenstein family into the Viennese establishment.
:
: The eight children of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein were baptized into the Catholic faith and raised as accepted and proud members of the Austrian high-bourgeoisie. (7-8)
: Wittgenstein's loss of religious faith, which, he later said, occurred while he was a schoolboy at Linz, was, one supposes, a consequence of this spirit of stark truthfulness. In other words, it was not so much that he lost his faith as that he now felt obliged to acknowledge that he had none, to confess that he could not believe the things a Christian was supposed to believe. This may have been one of the things he confessed to [his sister] Mining. Certainly he discussed it with [his other sister] Gretl, who, to help him in the philosophical reflection consequent on a loss of faith, directed him to the work of Schopenhauer. (18)
:[At Cambridge in 1912] When, for example, Wittgenstein met a student who happened to be a monk, Russell could report gleefully to Ottoline that he was 'far more terrible with Christians than I am':
:
:: He had liked F., the undergraduate monk, and was horrified to learn that he is a monk. F. came to tea with him and W. at once attacked him -- as I imagine, with absolute fury. Yesterday he returned to the charge, not arguing but only preaching honesty. (44)
:[In World War I] What saved him from suicide, however, was not the encouragement he received from Jolles and Frege, but exactly the kind of personal transformation, the religious conversion, he had gone to war to find. He was, as it were, saved by the word. During his first month in Galicia, he entered a bookshop, where he could find only one book: Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief. The book captivated him. It became for him a kind of talisman: he carried it wherever he went, and read it so often that he came to know whole passages of it by heart. He became known to his comrades as 'the man with the gospels.' For a time he -- who before the war had struck Russell as being "more terrible with Christians" than Russell himself -- became not only a believer, but an evangelist, recommending Tolstoy's Gospel to anyone in distress. "If you are not acquainted with it," he later told Ficker, "then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person." (116)
Monk also notes that he began to doubt at least by 1937 (pp. 382-384), and that by the end of his life he said he just could not believe Christian doctrines:
:[The last year of his life, 1950] This remark was possibly prompted by a conversation about Transsubstantiation that Wittgenstein had with Anscombe about this time. He was, it seems, surprised to hear from Anscombe that it really was Catholic belief that 'in certain circumstances a wafer completely changes its nature'. It is presumably an example of what he had in mind when he remarked to Malcolm about Anscombe and Smythies: "I could not possibly bring myself to believe all the things that they believe." Such beliefs could find no place in his own world picture. His respect for Catholicism, however, prevented him from regarding them as mistakes or "transient mental disturbances." ...
: In autumn Wittgenstein asked Anscombe if she could put him in touch with a "non-philosophical" priest. He did not want to discuss the finer points of Catholic doctrine; he wanted to be introduced to someone to whose life religious belief had made a practical difference. She introduced him to Father Conrad, the Dominican priest who had instructed Yorick Smythies during his conversion to Catholicism. Conrad came to Anscombe's house twice to talk to Wittgenstein. "He wanted", Conrad recalls, "to talk to a priest as a priest and did not wish to discuss philosophical problems":
:
::He knew he was very ill and wanted to talk about God, I think with a view to coming back fully to his religion, but in fact we only had, I think, two conversations on God and the soul in rather general terms.
:
: Anscombe, however, doubts that Wittgenstein wanted to see Conrad "with a view to coming back fully to his religion", if by that Conrad means that Wittgenstein wanted to return to the Catholic Church. And, given Wittgenstein's explicit statements that he could not believe certain doctrines of the Catholic Church, it seems reasonable to accept her doubt. (572-574)
:[His death-bed, 1951] The next day Ben, Anscombe, Smythies and Drury were gathered at the Bevans' home to be with Wittgenstein at his death. Symthies had brought with him Father Conrad, but no one would decide whether Conrad should say the usual office for the dying and give conditional absolution, until Drury recollected Wittgenstein's remark that he hoped his Catholic friends prayed for him. This decided the matter, and they all went up to Wittgenstein's room and kneeled down while Conrad recited the proper prayers. Shortly after this, Dr Bevan pronounced him dead.
:
: The next morning he was given a Catholic burial at St Giles's Church, Cambridge. The decision to do this was again prompted by a recollection of Drury's. He told the others:
:
:: I remember that Wittgenstein once told me of an incident in Tolstoy's life. When Tolstoy's brother died, Tolstoy, who was then a stern critic of the Russian Orthodox Church, sent for the parish priest and had his brother interred according to the Orthodox rite. 'Now', said Wittgenstein, 'that is exactly what I should have done in a similar case'.
:
: When Drury mentioned this, everyone agreed that all the usual Roman Catholic prayers should be said by a priest at the graveside (580)
Whew! That's a lot, I know, but the reason I put it here is to clarify how things progressed over the course of W.'s life, and because the article here tends to be very rich in information, but short in citations of the sources for it, so that when I or someone else has the time to incorporate more information about his religious journey into the article, the sources will be right here for use rather than scattered over the pages of The Duty of Genius.
Hope this helps. Radgeek 04:36, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Passionate Convert?

message: I've removed the claim that the Tractatus was written in Cambridge under Russell's supervision (the "World War I" section gives a truer account of the composition and publication).  I'm reading Monk's biography at the moment and several things seem to me to need fixing - Monk doesn't mention LW being "met at the train station by a crowd of England's greatest intellectuals", unless Keynes was a crowd.  Does anyone have a source for this?  The giving away of the family fortune and the donations to several Viennese artists were not at the same time, and so on.  I'm not going to cite sources, but assume that any changes I make over the next few days/weeks are from Monk.  --Andrew Norman 10:03, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Intro

message: Every quotation ought to be accompanied by a source reference. In the current list, the following, which superficially SOUND Wittgensteinian, appear to have been made up: 
* "The answer to every philosophical question is a truism."
* "The object is colourless."
*'The world we live in is the words we use.'
:Yet another good reason not to have quotes in the encyclopedia at all. That's what Wikiquote is for! Banno 02:22, August 16, 2005 (UTC)
::It is a good reason not to have misuse of quotes in the encyclopedia:)
::Sigg3.net 21:58, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  On bogus quotations 

message: Wittgenstein learned Kant's philosophy by reading Schopenhauer's Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy. Schopenhauer's account was extremely readable and provided an epitome or résumé of Kant's thought.
Lestrade 13:35, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kant I

message: There is a trail that leads from Schopenhauer to Wittgenstein's interest in the New Testament. In the fourth book of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, he stated that Christ's denial of both egotism and willfullness indicated the way to salvation, deliverance, or release from suffering. Tolstoy enthusiastically embraced this outlook and wrote a book about the gospels. Wittgenstein read both Schopenhauer's and Tolstoy's opinions and he accepted their views.
Lestrade 13:27, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Testament 

message: I started an article on the "New Wittgenstein" interpretation (this is not the best name, but it was the title of a recent book of essays by a bunch of the hotshots.) Please help expand and correct it. Many thanks, Sdedeo 15:45, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: "New Wittgenstein"

message: Why is Russel listed both in Influences and Influenced?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.226.246.81 (talk) 23:59, 19 December 2005
*Wittgenstein read, studied under, and was influenced by Russell's Principles of Mathematics.  When Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus, Russell himself admits, in the introduction to the Tractatus, that he is immensely impressed by the work, and subsequently Russell revised his work based on the Tractatus. 
From Bertrand Russell's bio:
Russell's influence on individual philosophers is singular, and perhaps most notably in the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was his student between 1911 and 1914. It should also be observed that Wittgenstein exerted considerable influence on Russell, especially in leading him to conclude, much to his regret, that mathematical truths were trivial, tautological truths. Evidence of Russell's influence on Wittgenstein can be seen throughout the Tractatus, which Russell was responsible for having published. Russell also helped to secure Wittgenstein's doctorate and a faculty position at Cambridge, along with several fellowships along the way. However, as previously stated, he came to disagree with Wittgenstein's later approach to philosophy, while Wittgenstein came to think of Russell as "superficial and glib," particularly in his popular writings
Cheers! Yorick, Jester of Elsinore 14:30, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: For that matter, Ramsey should ideally be listed under both influenced by and influenced as it was his discussions with W. more than anyone elses (arguably) that led to the Philosophical Investigations. 128.232.243.176 (talk) 14:15, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russel? 

message: We can't speak about anything that we haven't experienced. Has anyone experienced the witnessing of Wittgy's sexual activities? Has Wittgy publicly described his sexual activities? If not, what is all this talk about his liaisons and preferences?
It seems to me that there is an inverse relationship between interest in Wittgy's mental ideas and his physical acts. The less that someone is interested in what he wrote, the more they are interested in what he did.Lestrade 14:02, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Zip It