San Antonio College Library

"If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it," Paul Strathern writes, "he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished." Ludwig Wittgenstein was a superb logician who distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to logic. All else - metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself - was excluded. They were all wrong, he argued. "What we cannot speak about,"...

Centers around Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most powerfully magnetic philosophers of our time--brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark on all around him. This first novel features his colleagues/friends/rivals, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. The lightly fictionalized work progresses through the convolutions of Wittgenstein's career: his early life in Austria; his arrival...

On October 25, 1946, in Cambridge, England, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face-to-face for the first and only time. The encounter lasted just ten minutes, and did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend. Almost immediately, rumors spread around the world that the two great philosophers had come to blows, armed with red-hot pokers. Twenty years later, when Popper wrote an account of the incident,...

Each philosopher is preceded by an account of his life, academic career, and known extra-scholarly influences.

The two linguistic philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein are discussed in this program by world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and University of California Professor of Philosophy John Searle. Searle examines Wittgenstein's earlier picture theory of meaning, in which reality, as perceived by humans, determines the structure of the language used to describe it. A revised theory views language as a tool that, depending upon its use, prescribes...