Wittgensteinov žarač: priča o desetominutnoj svađi dvojice velikih filozofa
Why did an event that took place more than half a century ago, in a small room, at a regular meeting of a little-known university club, during a discussion on a thorny topic, cause such outrage?
This extraordinary narrative takes us to a cool, foggy October evening at King's College in Cambridge, England in 1946, where post-war poverty still reigns everywhere. At the regular meeting of the university club (The Moral Sciences Club), Dr. Karl Popper's lecture "Are there philosophical problems?" was announced, and among the thirty listeners were Ludwig Wittgenstein, a professor at Trinity College, and the famous, already aged, Lord Bertrand Russell .
The noisy and aggressive conflict that broke out between Wittgenstein and Popper after ten minutes of Popper's presentation, the causes of their principled disagreement as well as their mutual antipathies, and most of all the past that they shared for the most part make this book a truly irresistible combination of history, philosophy and biography. What makes it particularly interesting is the description of Russell's role in their careers, the incredible amount of rumors that spun around that short event (the Times Literary Supplement published the correspondence of the participants, on the basis of which this book was created) as well as the fact that almost no eyewitnesses could agree with others in his testimony. Along with somewhat eccentric Cambridge, but above all fin-de-siècle Vienna, their shared hometown and turbulent events that shaped not only their destinies and the history of ideas, but also the history of the entire world, served as historical scenery.
Two copies are available
