Quotes from John Heaton

Russell suggested he write an essay during the vacation on any philosophical subject. He did so, and when Russell had read the first sentence, he was persuaded that Wittgenstein was a man of genius

In 1913, Wittgenstein decided to live for two years in Norway on his own to meditate and work on logic. Russell tried to dissuade him.

He read Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief and was deeply influenced by it.

The idols of progress and the belief that technology will solve all our problems, he felt were profoundly wrong.

So when I tell you what I think, I am not transferring thoughts to you. I do not lose them when I tell them. I express what I think, and for you to understand, you need not think what I think, or have the same thought as I. You may need to know what I think and to say it, but not to have the thought or think it.

If I say: "I know that either it is raining or it is not raining," this is a tautology. It is the opposite of a contradiction, in that it is true whatever the circumstances, but it says nothing as it applies to nothing in particular.

The inner is not a brute reality which can be mapped out by psychologists, but a tangle of concepts relating the inner to the outer which lies at the heart of human understanding.

The business of philosophy is critique. It clarifies the limits of meaningful language. Science on the other hand consists of all true propositions. It studies the existence or nonexistence of states of affairs.

Persons, bodies and minds inhabit language.

The whole idea of "connections" between language and reality is a false one.

When we think language is on one side and reality is on the other, and then puzzle as to how they link up, we forget that we dwell in language and are merely imagining that we can point at them.

So, it is the spirit in which one acts that is vital, and the notion of language games clarifies this.

In his many remarks on mathematics, Wittgenstein is concerned to show the delusiveness of this picture. For when we reflect on it, we forget that we are looking at a projection of our own decisions and their consequences.

Ludwig was brought up in a house of music. There were seven grand pianos in his childhood home. The composers Brahms and Mahler were frequent visitors to the musical evenings, and young Pablo Casals played there.

When told that there was to be the annual jamboree for academic philosophers in Cambridge in 1947, he said it was as if he had been told that there would be bubonic plague in Cambridge, and he would make sure he was in London — which he was!

But in 1946 Wittgenstein fell in love with Ben Richards, an undergraduate student of medicine at Cambridge who was nearly forty years younger than him; this relationship brought him great joy and continued until his death.

People tended to be fascinated or repelled by him, as he was very direct in his approach to people and was impatient of any pretentiousness.

The music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann were amongst his favourites.

Now, ordinarily, when we say we know something, we can give compelling reasons for it. But when a philosopher says he knows he is holding his hand in front of him, he can give no reason that is as certain as the very thing it is meant to be a reason for. My having two hands is not less certain before I have looked at them than afterwards.

His outlook was typically one of gloom.

Only a change in our way of life would heal the sickness of our age — and this is only likely to happen when disaster confronts us.

Wittgenstein was always interested in the nature of philosophy, and from the 1930s on he became clear that philosophy was a - a very ancient view of it, for Socrates and many ancient Greek philosophers practised it that way.

He is not concerned with arguments to establish a position, as in much traditional philosophy. Rather, he is teaching a skill that is critical and destabilizing, seeking to fracture the artificial unities we construct with our minds, so that we can see differences.

We must do away with all explanation and allow only description in its place".