Taking its cue from the “Tractatus,” the Vienna Circle sought to make language as precise and rigorous as a mathematical proof. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” What philosophers need isn’t profundity but clarity: as Wittgenstein says in the “Tractatus,” “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. For the analytic philosophy he helped inspire, many of the discipline’s traditional problems are actually just misunderstandings, based on an erroneous use of language. In an age of triumphant physics, did philosophy still need to bother with metaphysics?īy declaring the answer to be no, Wittgenstein set modern thought on a new course. Now, in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory were redrawing the map of reality in ways that could be verified by experiment and given precise mathematical expression. Since the Greeks, Western thinkers had tried to understand the world using terms such as “being” and “becoming,” “substance” and “essence,” “real” and “ideal.” But these abstractions gave rise to complicated arguments that went around and around, never reaching any definite conclusion. It aimed to tear Western philosophy up by the roots, just as revolutionaries on the left and the right were doing to societies all across postwar Europe.įor Wittgenstein, the renovation of philosophy had to begin with language. Today, it is Wittgenstein’s later work that commands the most attention, but the “Tractatus”-a brief, dense book that, like Euclid’s treatise on geometry, takes the form of a series of numbered propositions-magnetized readers from the start with its radical ambition. It was while on leave in the summer of 1918 that Wittgenstein completed his “ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which was published in 1921.
Captured just days before the Armistice, in November, 1918, he spent nine months as a prisoner of war in Italy before returning home to Vienna, an imperial capital suddenly stranded in a small, parochial new state. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, served in the war as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. The defeat of the Central Powers in the First World War gave rise to one of these historic bursts of creative thinking. At moments of humiliation and confusion, when people need to rebuild their understanding of the world, they are willing to rethink assumptions that go unchallenged in normal times.
Socrates served in the losing Athenian army in the Peloponnesian War Thomas Hobbes wrote “ Leviathan” while in exile in Paris after the defeat of the royalists in the English Civil War. Philosophy often flourishes in the aftermath of wars, especially lost wars.
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