"According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), philosophy is a 'battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.' This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought and his place in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cult-like following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna. Gottlieb's meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him."--from the inside front flap.

Peter Munz, a former student of both Popper and Wittgenstein, begins his comparison of the two great twentieth-century philosophers, by explaining that since the demise of positivism there have emerged, broadly speaking, two philosophical options: Wittgenstein, with the absolute relativism of his theory that meaning is a function of language games and that social configurations are determinants of knowledge; and Popper's evolutionary epistemology - conscious knowledge is a special case of the relationship which exists between all living beings and their environments. Professor Munz e