JS:
>And W had published only the Tractatus at that point; the >Investigations
was still a box of scraps.
W's enormous influence between the wars and especially after WWII can mostly be attributed to his teaching (a who's who of post-war anglo-analytic philosophy) and posthumous publications. Even PI wasn't published until after his death.
>From the forwarded piece:
>>The two philosophers, according to the
>>book, lived their lives on a collision course.
JS:
>Not exactly; they hardly intersected
Certainly the exchanges between Frege and W, Husserl and Meinong, and Frege and Husserl are more interesting. Still, what would Freud have made of that poker?
>From the forwarded piece:
>>Wittgenstein negotiated with the leaders of Nazi Germany,
>>trying to buy his sisters Arian pedigrees for an enormous sum of >>money
First time I've read this. Didn't his sisters perish in the Holocaust?
JS (on Popper's popularity in print vs. Wittgenstein's)
>This is bizzare. Just read through a few back issuesof the British J. >for
the Phil of Sci, or the US Journal Phil ASci, Popper is discussed >all the
time. As for Kant scholarship, actually outsude of >Kantstudien, there isn;t
that much; history is hard time finding a >place for publication. Popperians
are a big force, especially in >England, wherreas today there are no
Wittgensteinians
Wittgenstein's work, if broken down into categories, doesn't fall directly under philosophy of science. Most of what I read that seems to interest so many now are his ideas in philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and psychology (hence the Brentano, Meinong, Husserl connection).
There are probably something like 10,000 scholarly books and articles out there now on Wittgenstein, his life, his thoughts, and their relevance to everything from anabaptists to zebras. I remember at grad school in the US a group of religious types who centered their philosophy on him.
Clearly he appeals much more to the post-modern episteme, but not necessarily so much anymore in academic philosophy at North American logic departments.
Popper gave us 'inductive falsification' and 'the open society', two ideas that attain to meme status still pervade the social sciences. He seems to have been a philosopher of science that scientists read. Popper, as I stated in an earlier post, is anathema in much left-wing academia because of his longheld anti-Marxism. In this connection, he is not well-liked in the social sciences because he was one of those who insisted that certain fields that were enormously popular were merely pseudo-sciences (and the pseudo-sciences he attacked were Marxism and psychoanalysis--something people like Deleuze and Guattari got around to rubbishing in an entirely different tradition).
And as a post-script to an earlier post, I said that Feyerabend finds a perfect contemporary in Baudrillard. Actually, I meant Lyotard. Sorry for my post-Lacanian slip.
Charles Jannuzi