Blackwell Reference Online

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Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was the youngest child of a wealthy and cultured Viennese family of Jewish descent. The Wittgenstein home was a centre of artistic and, in particular, musical life. It provided Ludwig with what he later called his ‘good intellectual nursery-training’, which consisted of the music of Viennese classicism and a strand of German literature — with Goethe as a figurehead — which rejected the nationalism and faith in progress that characterized the mainstream of European culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wittgenstein was a cultural conservative who felt at odds with the ‘spirit of the main current of European and American civilization’ (CV 6–7; CV contains Wittgenstein's intermittent reflections on cultural questions). But his intense intellectual passion and honesty prevented him from being nostalgic or parochial. Indeed, he reacted in a highly creative way to certain modern ideas. This becomes clear when we turn to the direct influences on his thinking, which he listed in 1931: Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa (CV 19). Those which are relevant to his earlier philosophy fall into three groups: the sages, the philosopher-scientists and the philosopher-logicians. The sages were thinkers outside academic philosophy whose work Wittgenstein read as a youngster. Karl Kraus, the formidable ... log in or subscribe to read full text