After World War II, Ludwig Wittgenstein was primum inter pares among fellow philosophers, an emigre from Vienna who had become a Canbridge legend, attracting numerous disciples despite having published only one book. The younger Karl Popper was, like Wittgenstein, an emigre Jew from Vienna, but the comparison stopped there. Popper was alone and adrift in postwar London without a heavyweight reputation or an permanent academic appointment. The emerging philosophies of these two men couldn't have been more different: Wittgenstein obsessed with the beclouding of precise meaning by imprecise language, and, so, a poser of linguistic puzzles and conundrums; Popper deeply committed to the positive, life-enhancing, moral uses of philosophy.
In October 0f 1946, the Cambridge Moral Science Club invited
Popper to address the group on the seemingly-harmless question:
Are There Philosophical Problems? The grand old man of
British philosophy, Bertrand Russell, was present, as was
Wittgenstein, other dons, and a large contingent of graduate
students. Wittgenstein was known as a vigorous interrogator
of would-be philosophers, and he lit into Popper, challenging the
speaker to give an example of a moral rule, as he (Wittgenstein)
nervously gesticulated, brandishing a poker he had picked up from
the room's fireplace. Popper claims his reply, his example
of a moral rule, was "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with
pokers." At least this is the version of this famous
encounter as Popper relates it in his autobiography.
Popper's glory days were yet to come, but by the Fifties, he had
risen in prominence, mostly based on his philosophy of science and
his critical notion of falsifiability.
By using this Cambridge encounter as a focal point, the authors
not only tell a compelling tale of two strong-willed, even
stubborn, men, but also demonstrates Wittgenstein's and Popper's
fundamental philosophical differences in shorthand, and present
intriguing depictions of both Vienna between the wars, and
of Cambridge in the 1940s. The mere showing by this
book that something as august and self-important as deep
philosophy runs in fads and cycles over generations is worth the
price of admission itself.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer