HERE is a link to an e-text of Wittgenstein's 'Lectures on Philosophy'

In the same class, but (I think I am right in saying) actually a year behind himself, was another young man, also not particularly happy, but one who was to reveal a distinctly less sensitive side of himself in years to come. His name was Adolf Hitler. Nobody knows for sure how much these two had to do with one another - it has been speculated that Hitler hated Wittgenstein and that his anti-Semitism had roots in these schooldays, but I believe this is little more than pulling a good yarn out of tragic history. It is interesting to reflect, however, that of these two rather misfit schoolboys, one, the duller one, had a terrible and irrevocable influence on European history while the other, manifestly the brighter of the two, left a lasting influence only on a small corner of a particularly arcane branch of learning.

Wittgenstein left school and went to England to pursue mathematical engineering in Manchester, in England. There, he did well - but he realised that he needed considerably greater mathematical knowledge to pursue his chosen fields of study. So he went to Cambridge and studied under the highly prestigious Bertrand Russell, a man who had devoted a substantial percentage of his intellectual energy to establishing the logical foundation of mathematics (a foundation that was effectively to be destroyed by the later work of Kurt Gödel, though it stands as a tremendous human achievement). Russell said of Wittgenstein that teaching him was '…one of the most exciting intellectual adventures [of my life]…[Wittgentstein had] fire and penetration and intellectual purity to a quite extraordinary degree…[He] soon knew all that I had to teach.'

However, Wittgenstein did not find Cambridge an ideal environment. He thought the scholars there were far too devoted to cleverness and not enough to depth. He left for Norway, where he lived in isolation, working on his first book (and the only one that would be published in his lifetime), the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The war broke out in 1914 and Wittgenstein immediately travelled back to Austria and signed up. He earned many distinctions for bravery during the war and ended it in a prisoner of war camp in Italy, from where (luckily) he was allowed to send the manuscript of the Tractatus to Russell.

Following the war, Wittgenstein gave away the family fortune he had inherited and committed himself to more mundane matters than the higher reaches of philosophical logic. He became a primary school teacher, following an ideology of teaching which encouraged children to think, rather than learn facts. But, despite having given away his wealth, he never really fitted in with the unprivileged children he taught and their families. He was very unhappy and came close to suicide on more than one occasion. He loved the children, but never really established relations with the adults he met, including the other teachers.

He felt he had failed as a teacher, but did not want to go back to academic life, so he worked on many other jobs - as a gardener's assistant in a monastery and as an architect, amongst other things.

During all this time, though, he continued to think and to work on the Tractatus. He came back to the academic world, submitting this as his doctoral thesis, effectively transforming the world of philosophy with this one book. Ironically, the single greatest and most effective critic of the Tractatus was Wittgenstein himself, who later came to repudiate much of what he had said in it. In his other major work, the Philosophical Investigations, not published until after his death, he explicitly admitted that he had made a mistake in his first work. This book also transformed the world of philosophy - Wittgenstein is probably the only great philosopher to have achieved two opposing revolutions in philosophy!

Wittgentstein continued an academic at Cambridge until 1947, occupying important posts, including Professor of Philosophy (to which he was appointed in 1939), only breaking this with a spell as a porter at Guy's Hospital during the second world war.

He retired to an isolated cottage in the west of Ireland and was diagnosed as having cancer in 1949. It seems he was not too unhappy about this - he claimed he did not wish to live any longer. He died still doing philosophy, his mind unaffected by his illness.

We will discuss his philosophy in the session. But to give you a flavour, here is a quotation from his own writing, explaining why philosophy is so hard. It is not because the world itself is complicated, or that the conclusions are complicated - it is rather that we are wrong about things in such complicated ways! The knots we have tied are necessarily very hard to untie!

'Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought to be simple. Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that we have, in a senseless way, put there. To do this it must make movements that are just as complicated as these knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its method cannot be if it is to succeed. The complexity of philosophy is not a complexity of its subject matter, but of our knotted understanding.'

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