Stephen Toulmin and Alan Janik; see also Carl Schorske, Fin de Siecle Vienna, my own teacher.
makes a good case that
>Ludwig and the Logical Positivists should better be situated in the context
>of Austro-Hungarian neo-Kantianism and the vogue for Schopenhauer than in
>the tradition of Anglo-American philosophy.
No doubt you can't properly understand Wittgenstein or the positivists without understand Vienna, any more than you can understand Marx without understanding German classical philosophy. My point si just that they took advantage of the freedoms of liberal demiocracy to develop their ideas. Btw you also can't understand Marx without understanding British political economy (as well as French socialism), and you can't understand Wittgenstein without understanding his relation to British analytical philosophy, or the positivists without their relation to British empiricism.
>
>The tone of Wittgenstein's philosophy, with its continual motif of
>quasi-religious spiritual searching and intellectual self-flagellation, is
>miles away from the spirit of most British philosophy.
Right. At his PhD orals at Cambridge, he told his examiners, Russell and Moore (some committee!) that they'd never understand his point in the Tractatus.
Moore wrote, as hisd examination report (I paraphrase from memory) that, "In my opinion Mr. L. W.'s Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus is a work of genius. Be that as it may it satisfies the requirements for a PhD at the University of Cambridge."
jks (Kings College '82)
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