Wittgenstein, Marx, etc.

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sat Apr 6 08:43:09 PST 2002



>
>Justin said:
>
> >Wittgenstein was a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
>
>And worked for most of his career in England. Maybe I should have also
>claimed Marx and Engels for liberal democracy on the same grounds, so I
>will. They surea s hell couldn;t have done what they did on the contintent.
>That is why they were in England! Isaiah Berlin was "product" of Russia,
>and Karl Popper, Carnap, etc. were Viennese too. Does that mean that they
>didn't become English and American philosophers.
>---------
>I say:
>
>What's his name in the book Wittgenstein's Vienna

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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