"Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein were two of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. The account of their one and only meeting at Cambridge in 1946 has become legendary for the aggressive disagreement between the two men. Peter Munz, an eye witness to the great dispute, is the only person in the world to have been a student of both Popper and Wittgenstein. Here he describes their philosophical relationship as he experienced it." "Munz argues that the later Wittgenstein and Popper ought to be seen as complementing one another. Popper believed that when truth is discovered meaning will take care of itself. However, since, in Popper's view, we can never verify a general proposition, we can never be certain of its truth. There must therefore be a way of understanding what it means even though we cannot be sure of its truth. The post-Tractatus Wittgenstein enables us to see how propositions are meaningful regardless of whether we can ascertain their truth and thus fills a gap in Popper's philosophy." "At the same time, Popper was able to make up a deficiency in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. While Wittgenstein had had it that meaningful propositions can be generated in any social order, Popper showed that if propositions are to be true as well as have meaning, the socio-political order in which they are put forward, has to be free and open." "Popper and Wittgenstein were barking up the same tree. Though they had much to learn from each other, their personalities stood in the way. Munz imaginatively reconstructs a dialogue to show how the conversation ought to have gone on that famous evening at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge in 1946 and then sets out in detail the philosophy that would result from a synthesis of these two men."--BOOK JACKET

Rubinstein, David M.

Ernest Gellner (1925-95) has been described as 'one of the last great central European polymath intellectuals'. His last book, first published in 1998, throws light on two leading thinkers of their time. Wittgenstein, arguably the most influential and the most cited philosopher of the twentieth century, is famous for having propounded two radically different philosophical positions. Malinowski, the founder of modern British social anthropology, is usually credited with being the inventor of ethnographic fieldwork, a fundamental research method throughout the social sciences. In a highly original way, Gellner shows how the thought of both men grew from a common background of assumptions - widely shared in the Habsburg Empire of their youth - about human nature, society, and language. Tying together themes which preoccupied him throughout his working life, Gellner epitomizes his belief that philosophy - far from 'leaving everything as it is' - is about important historical, social and personal issues.

The cornerstone of the radical program of positivism was the separation of science from metaphysics. In the good old days, the solution to this demarca tion problem was seen as a way of separating sheep from goats - ~ynthetic or analytic propositions, which were candidates for truth or falsity, either on empirical or formal grounds, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, those deceptive propositions which appeared to be truth claims, but were instead either meaningless, or nonsensical, or poetical, or merely expressive - i.e. without proper cognitive content and hence not verifiable or falsifiable. In the last half century, analytic philosophy of science, linguistic analysis and logic have formulated and reformulated and reformulated again the distinction be tween science and metaphysics. The outcome was unexpected: metaphysics rather than retreating from the scene, shriveling up, dissolving, has instead re emerged as an acknowledged, even if problematic component of scientific theorizing. This has made some philosophers of science happy, others miserable. For Morris Lazerowitz, it should serve as evidence for his thesis that the sort of philosophical assertions which metaphysics makes about the nature of things are not simply radically undecidable, but persist because they express a deeper and unconscious function in the mental life of philosophers (and presumably, of those scientists who find it necessary to be philosophical in this way, whether self-consciously or tacitly).

"This volume collects practically all significant correspondence and documents relating to Ludwig Wittgenstein's long association with Cambridge, between his arrival in 1911 and his death there in 1951. The letters he exchanged with his most illustrious Cambridge contemporaries Russell, Keynes, Moore and Ramsey (previously published as Cambridge Letters) art included with updated notes. Some 200 previously unpublished letters and documents are added, including 40 letters from Wittgenstein to his friend and Cambridge contemporary, the economist Piero Sraffa. Many letters from or to followers, pupils, friends or younger colleagues are included, showing his influence on them and the ideals they tried to put into practice in their own teaching or writing. The friends and followers of his last years - Rush Rhees, G. H. von Wright and Norman Malcolm - close the series. Minutes of meetings representing Wittgenstein's incursions into University business and The Moral Science Club are also included in their chronological place." "Anyone interested in Wittgenstein's philosophy, his life or University life in the first half of the last century will find something in this book, fully annotated and providing lists of correspondents, index and cross-references."--BOOK JACKET.