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Happy 135th Birthday to Ludwig Wittgenstein

April 26th is the birthday of well-known philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, (Vienna 1889).

He was described by his mentor Bertrand Russell as "the most perfect example I have known of genius as traditionally conceived: passionate, profound, intense, and dominating." He was the youngest of nine children; three of his brothers committed suicide.

In 1908, before he met Russell, Wittgenstein began studying aeronautical engineering at Manchester University. He moved to Cambridge in 1911 and that got him connected with the philosophy crowd there, headed by Bertie.

Wittgenstein was born into one of the richest families in Austro-Hungary, but he later gave away his inheritance to his siblings, and also to an assortment of Austrian writers and artists, including Rainer Maria Rilke.

He once said that the study of philosophy rescued him from nine years of loneliness and wanting to die, yet he tried to leave philosophy several times and pursue another line of work, including serving in the army during World War I, working as a porter at a London hospital, and teaching elementary school.

Wittgenstein was particularly interested in language. He wrote, "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/

Interesting trivia: when it says that his family was rich it means his dad Karl was the Andrew Carnegie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the end of the 19th century he controlled an effective monopoly on steel and iron.

When the Nazis rose to power, the Wittgenstein family was permitted to whitewash their Jewish origins and become Protestant.

It reminds me of the joke punchline "we needed the eggs."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Wittgenstein

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someone pointed me to this regarding 29th April:

DEATH of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (29 April 1951) 73 years ago. Bertrand Russell's full OBITUARY in Mind journal to his prized student and one time good friend.
”Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) (6.4311)
━━
I.- OBITUARY MIND
The Editor regrets to announce the death of Ludwig Wittgenstein on 29 April 1951, at Cambridge.
II.- LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
By BERTRAND RUSSELL

When I made the acquaintance of Wittgenstein, he told me that he had been intending to become an engineer, and with that end in view had gone to Manchester. In the course of his studies in engineering he had become interested in mathematics, and in the course of his studies in mathematics he had become interested in the principles of mathematics. He asked people at Manchester (so he told me) whether there was such a subject, and whether anyone worked at it. They told him that there was such a subject and that he could find out more about it by coming to me at Cambridge, which he accordingly did. Quite at first I was in doubt as to whether he was a man of genius or a crank, but I very soon decided infavour of the former alternative. Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential proposition are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: ”There is no hippopotamus in this room at present”. When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced.
He made very rapid progress in mathematical logic, and soon knew all that I had to teach. He did not, I think, know Frege personally at that time, but he read him and greatly admired him. I naturally lost sight of him during the 1914-18 war, but I got a letter from him soon after the armistice, written from Monte Casino. He told me that he had been taken prisoner, but fortunately with his manuscript, which was the Tractatus. I pulled strings to get him released by the Italian Government, and we met at the Hague, where we discussed the Tractatus, line by line.
I cannot say very much about his opinions before 1914, as they were in a state of formation and flux. He was thinking very intensely and very fruitfully but was not yet arriving at anything very definite. While I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G. E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, ”I think very well of him indeed”. When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said that it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures.
Getting to know Wittgenstein was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life. In later years there was a lack of intellectual sympathy between us, but in early years I was as willing to learn from him as he from me. His thought had an almost incredible degree of passionately intense penetration, to which I gave whole-hearted admiration. He was in the days before, 1914 concerned almost solely with logic. During or perhaps just before, the first war, he changed his out look and became more or less of a mystic, as may be seen here and there in the Tractatus. He had been dogmatically anti-Christian but in this respect he changed completely. The only thing he ever told me about this was that once in a village in Galicia during the war he found a book shop containing only one book, which was Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought the book, and, according to him, it influenced him profoundly. Of the development of his opinions after 1919 I cannot speak.
Bertrand Russell
━━
Background: Death of Ludwig Wittgenstein (29 April 1951)
(cont'd)

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Background: Death of Ludwig Wittgenstein (29 April 1951)

Wittgenstein began work on his final manuscript, MS. manuscript 177, on 25 April 1951. It was his 62nd birthday on 26 April. He went for a walk the next afternoon, and wrote his last entry that day, 27 April. That evening, he became very ill; when his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, ”Good!”. Wittgenstein died at only 62 suffering from prostate cancer, to his last days he greatly admired Russell, saying ”Tell them I've had a wonderful life” yet adding “There cannot be any real relation of friendship between us.” On his religious views, which are to this day open to dispute and debate, Wittgenstein was said to be interested and sympathetic to Catholicism, but did not consider himself to be a devotee. These examples are vague and numerous. Wittgenstein's religious thoughts/beliefs are held by some scholars to be agnostic.

”I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that!”
— Wittgenstein (1949)