Historical Note

I'm doing research for a follow-up post on Music, War, and Philosophy and I stumbled across something quite remarkable. In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War Bertrand Russell, one of the most prominent English philosophers of the first half of the 20th century, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most important philosopher of the 20th century, exchanged some correspondence. Russell had sent to Wittgenstein a copy of his newly-published Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and Wittgenstein had sent his newly-completed and corrected text of the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus to Russell asking him to contribute an introduction and help him to find a publisher.

Now what is worth noting here is that the work of Russell and Wittgenstein on logic and the foundations of mathematics (along with the earlier work of Gottlob Frege) was the first advance on the logical treatises of Aristotle, written 2,300 years before. Another important fact is that Russell was a pacifist while Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian Army as soon as the war broke out. In fact, he wrote much of his book while serving as a lieutenant in an artillery regiment. Despite being on opposite sides of a global conflict they were not only close friends but Russell had chosen Wittgenstein to carry on his work of fixing the misunderstandings of philosophy.

But what is really mind-boggling is that they had both written their foundational works while in prison! Russell wrote the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while in Brixton Prison for publicly lecturing against the war and Wittgenstein sent him the Tractatus while in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp.

Incidentally, the Tractatus, one of the most bizarre books of philosophy ever written, consists of seven numbered propositions starting with 1 The world is everything that is the case. It ends with 7 Of what one cannot speak, about that one must be silent. Except for a note on page one about the numbering system, there are no footnotes. There is also no other editorial matter apart from a brief preface. No bibliography. Each proposition has numbered sub-propositions:

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state-of-things then the possibility of the state-of-things must already be prefigured in the thing.

When it was first published no-one, not Frege, not even Russell, really understood it, but after a few years, in June 1929, Cambridge awarded him a PhD, based on the Tractatus as his dissertation.

Times have certainly changed... 

For anyone interested, there is an excellent new translation out last year.