Quotes About Wittgenstein

One anecdote should be recorded. I asked Wittgenstein whether, when he wrote the Tractatus, he had ever decided upon anything as an example of a 'simple object'. His reply was that at that time his thought had been that he was a logician; and that it was not his business, as a logician, to try to decide whether this thing or that was a simple thing or a complex thing, that being a purely empirical matter! It was clear that he regarded his former opinion as absurd.

Once in Cambridge I heard one undergraduate in earnestness inform another that Wittgenstein delivered his lectures while lying on the floor and gazing

One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy, the notion of a 'language-game', apparently had its genesis in this incident.

Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is' (§ 6.44). 1 believe that a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced by Wittgenstein, not only during the Tractatus period, but also when I knew him.4 Whether this feeling has anything to do with

Wittgenstein, if I understand him correctly, has a position much closer to that of psychoanalysis; he limits the task of philosophy to that of recognizing the inevitable insanity of language. "My aim is," he says, "to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense." "He who understands me finally recognizes [my propositions] as senseless." 12