Region	Western Philosophy
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	John Rogers Searle
Birth date	July 31, 1932
Birth place	Denver, Colorado
School tradition	Analytic
Notable ideas	Speech acts Chinese room
Main interests	Philosophy of languagePhilosophy of mindIntentionality Social reality
Influences	David HumeJ.L. AustinBertrand Russell Ludwig WittgensteinGottlob Frege P.F. StrawsonHubert Dreyfus
alma mater	University of Wisconsin, University of Oxford }}

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biography

Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T;, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University where he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in philosophy and ethics. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959, where, among his many distinctions, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004.

Politics

In the 1950s, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy" (McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin).

While a professor at Berkeley in 1964, he joined the Free Speech Movement opposing policies of the university administration. Later, in 1969, he sided with the administration against the students over People's Park. Also in 1969, he served as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California. He authored ''The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony'' (1971). The book attempted to investigate the causes behind the campus uprisings of the era. In it, Searle notes: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... several radical polemicists.... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred -- one might almost say terror -- of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts: "[M]y wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked." In an op-ed piece written shortly after 9/11, Searle maintained that:

''We need to give up on the fantasy that we are going to find Bin Laden hiding in a cave, and when we do so, our troubles will be over...There will be plenty of others, perhaps reinspired by his martyrdom, to take up where he left off.''

Further, he argued the attacks were part of a longer-term struggle whose only solution was to root out governments that supported terrorism.

In the 1980s Searle and his wife Dagmar, who is an attorney, owned half of a seventeen unit apartment house in Berkeley. Berkeley's rent control laws were causing the couple to lose money every month. Searle's wife Dagmar filed a lawsuit claiming that Berkeley's very tenant-friendly rent control laws were denying landlords their constitutional rights. To the amazement of many, the court ruled in favor of the Searles. This judgment prevailed on appeal to the California Supreme Court. This led the California Supreme Court to overturn the rent control policy of the city of Berkeley, California, in what came to be known as the "Searle Decision." The city government claimed this led to "significantly increased rent levels in Berkeley."

Philosophy

Speech acts

Searle's early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues including J.L. Austin (the term "illocutionary act"), Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), and his own thesis, in 'Speech Acts,' that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of P.F. Strawson, John Rawls, and H. Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), and William P. Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence, and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity. In his 1969 book ''Speech Acts'', Searle sets out to combine all of these elements to give an account of so-called 'illocutionary acts', which Austin had introduced in ''How To Do Things with Words''.

Despite his announced intention (1969, 54) to present a "full dress analysis of the illocutionary act," Searle in fact does not give one. Instead, he provides an analysis of the allegedly prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further (supposed) illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).

Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the 'illocutionary force' and the 'propositional content' of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences: # Sam smokes habitually. # Does Sam smoke habitually? # Sam, smoke habitually! # Would that Sam smoked habitually! each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire, respectively) (1969, 22).

According to a later account which Searle presents in ''Intentionality'' (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in ''Speech Acts'', illocutionary acts are characterised by their having ''conditions of satisfaction'' (as idea adopted from Strawson's (1971) paper "Meaning and Truth" ) and a ''direction of fit'' (an idea adopted from Elizabeth Anscombe). For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e. John did buy two candy bars. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars. Searle refers to the first as having the ''word-to-world'' direction of fit, since the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world, and the second as having the ''world-to-word'' direction of fit, since the world is supposed to change to match the words. (There is also the double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and the null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I'm sorry I ate John's candy bars.")

In "Foundations of Illocutionary Logic" (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of "illocutionary point." (Although Searle does not mention earlier uses of the concept, it originates from Alexander Sesonske's article "Performatives.")

Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers, and in a variety of ways. A wide-ranging critique is offered by F.C. Doerge . Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in: Burkhardt 1990 and Lepore / van Gulick 1991. For a debate which became famous see Jacques Derrida's ''Limited Inc.'' and Searle's brief reply in ''The Construction of Social Reality''.

Intentionality and the Background

Searle defines 'Intentionality" as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs in the world. , The nature of intentionality is an important part of discussions of the Searle's "Philosophy of Mind". Searle emphasizes that the word ‘intentionality,(The part of the mind directed to/from/about objects and relations in the world independent of mind) should not be confused with the word ‘intensionality’ (The logical property of some sentences that do not pass the test of 'extensinalidade'). In ''Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind'' (1983), professor Searle sets out to apply certain elements of his account(s) of "illocutionary acts" to the investigation of intentionality. Searle also introduces a technical term ''the Background'', which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes, "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it.") ''Background'' he calls the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the ''Background'' with the concept of ''the Network'', one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein's private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background") and Bourdieu's ''habitus''.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm won't go off, that the board won't suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent won't magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities won't have occurred to either player, Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious, though elements of it can be called to consciousness (if the fire alarm does go off, say).

Consciousness

Building upon his views about Intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book ''The Rediscovery of the Mind'' (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism (an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In ''Intentionality'', he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:

:No one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance). (p. 263)

Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.

Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called ''biological naturalism''.)

Ontological subjectivity

Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are ''epistemically'' objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ''ontologically'' objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically ''subjective''. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically ''objective''. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) which are ''ontologically'' subjective, i.e. are experienced subjectively. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically ''objective'' claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". But the pain itself is ''ontologically subjective'': it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance ''is'' the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Artificial intelligence

A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI. (Familiarity with the Turing test is useful for understanding the issue.) Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, write what it says on the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese—they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return—yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique. Functionalists claim that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are ''observer-relative'': observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have ''causal efficacy'' and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.

Social reality

Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality. Searle begins by arguing collective intentionality (e.g. "we're going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g. "I'm going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he's going for a walk with me and thinks I think I'm going for a walk with him and ...").

Searle's ''The Construction of Social Reality'' (1995) addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts," Searle distinguishes between ''brute facts'', like the height of a mountain, and ''institutional facts'', like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through logical rules of the form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.

Rationality

In ''Rationality in Action'' (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: you get on at one point with your beliefs and desires and the rules of rationality compel you all the way to a conclusion. Searle doubts this picture of rationality holds generally.

Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never do this and believes that this is perfectly rational.

Yet most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons don't cause you to do anything, because having sufficient reason ''wills'' (but doesn't ''force'') you to do that thing. So in any decision situation we experience a gap between our reasons and our actions. For example, when we decide to vote, we do not simply determine that we care most about economic policy and that we prefer candidate Jones's economic policy. We also have to make an effort to cast our vote. Similarly, every time a guilty smoker lights a cigarette they are aware of succumbing to their craving, not merely of acting automatically as they do when they exhale. It is this gap that makes us think we have ''freedom of the will''. Searle thinks whether we really have free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says that all rational activity presupposes free will.

Second, he believes rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. We see certain behavior as rational, no matter what its source, and our system of rules derives from finding patterns in what we see as rational.

Third, Searle believes we can rationally do things that don't result from our own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e. that facts about how the world is can never tell you what you should do ('Hume's Law'). By contrast, in so far as a fact is understood as relating to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the "brute facts" related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it, because by making the promise you are participating in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise making itself, and therefore understand a "shouldness" as implicit in the mere factual action of promising. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action—if you order a drink at a bar, you should pay for it even if you have no desire to. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'" (1964), remains highly controversial, but even three decades later Searle continued to defend his view that "..the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative."

Fourth, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting our (often inconsistent) patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model, one would start from a desire to go to Paris greater than that of saving money and calculate the cheapest way to get there, in reality people balance the niceness of Paris against the costs of travel to decide which desire (visiting Paris or saving money) they value more.

Bibliography

''Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language'' (1969)

''The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony'' (political commentary; 1971)

''Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts'' (essay collection; 1979)

''Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind'' (1983)

''Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures'' (lecture collection; 1984)

''John Searle and His Critics'' (Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, eds.; 1991)

''The Rediscovery of the Mind'' (1992)

''The Construction of Social Reality'' (1995)

''The Mystery of Consciousness'' (review collection; 1997)

''Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World'' (summary of earlier work; 1998)

''Rationality in Action'' (2001)

''Consciousness and Language'' (essay collection; 2002)

''Freedom and Neurobiology'' (lecture collection; 2004)

''Mind: A Brief Introduction'' (summary of work in philosophy of mind; 2004)

''Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays'' (2008)

''Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization'' (2010)

''Foundations of Illocutionary Logic'' (John Searle & Daniel Vanderveken 2010)

See also

Further reading

By John Searle:

''Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of language'', (1969)

''The Campus War'', (1971)

''Expression and Meaning'', (1979)

* Introduction

* Origins of the essays

* 1. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts

* 2. Indirect speech acts

* 3. The logical status of fictional discourse

* 4. Metaphor

* 5. Literal meaning

* 6. Referential and attributive

* 7. Speech acts and recent linguistics

"Minds, Brains and Programs", ''The Behavioral and Brain Sciences''.3, pp. 417–424. (1980)

''Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind'' (1983), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-27302-1

''Minds, Brains and Science'' (1984), Harvard University Press, hardcover: ISBN 0-674-57631-4, paperback: ISBN 0-674-57633-0

"Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" (1990) Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association

"Collective Intentions and Actions".(1990) in ''Intentions in Communication'' J. M. P. R. Cohen, & M. and E. Pollack. Cambridge, Mass.: . MIT Press: 401-416.

''The Rediscovery of the Mind'' (1992) ISBN 0-262-69154-X

The Problem of Consciousness, ''Social Research'', Vol. 60, No.1, Spring 1993.

''The Construction of Social Reality'' (1995)

''The Mystery of Consciousness'', Granta Books, (1997) hardcover: ISBN 1-86207-122-5, New York Review Books paperback: ISBN 0-940322-06-4

Consciousness Ann. Rev. Neurosci. (2000) 23:557-78. Review.

''Rationality in Action'', MIT Press, (2001) – contains (among other things) Searle's account of akrasia

''Consciousness and Language'' (2002), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-59744-7

D. Koepsell (ed.) and L. Moss (ed.) "Searle and Smith: A Dialogue" in ''John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms, and Reconstructions'' (2003), Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-1258-1

''Mind: A Brief Introduction'' (2004), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515733-8

''Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power'' (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-13752-4

Dualism revisited ''J Physiol Paris''. 2007 Jul-Nov;101(4-6):169-78. Epub 2008 Jan 19.

M. Bennett, D. Dennett, P. Hacker, J. Searle, ''Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language'' (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-14044-4

The Storm Over the University

Doerge (2006), Friedrich Christoph: ''Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It''. Tuebingen: Tuebingen University. http://tobias-lib.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/volltexte/2006/2273/pdf/Dissertation_Doerge.pdf

References

External links

John Searle's ''Machines Like Us'' interview

Searle's homepage at UC Berkeley

Conversations with Searle.

Interview in Conversations with History series. Available in webcast and podcast.

Conversations with History:John R. Searle on YouTube

Video or transcript of an interview with John Searle on language, writing, mind, and consciousness

Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

Webcast of Philosophy of Society lectures

Philosophy of Language: an interview with John Searle ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8, 2007.

The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with John Searle 2011-06-13

Category:20th-century philosophers Category:American philosophers Category:Analytic philosophers Category:Atheist philosophers Category:American atheists Category:Epistemologists Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Philosophers of language Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni Category:American Rhodes scholars Category:Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Artificial intelligence researchers Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Jean Nicod Prize laureates Category:Communication theorists Category:Rationality theorists Category:1932 births Category:Living people Category:National Humanities Medal recipients

ar:جون سورل bg:Джон Съръл ca:John Searle cs:John Searle da:John Searle de:John Searle et:John Searle es:John Searle fa:جان سرل fr:John Searle hr:John Searle is:John Searle it:John Searle nl:John Searle ja:ジョン・サール oc:John Searle pl:John Searle pt:John Searle ro:John R. Searle ru:Сёрль, Джон Роджерс sk:John Rogers Searle fi:John Searle sv:John Searle tr:John Searle zh:约翰·罗杰斯·希尔勒

name	Ludwig Wittgenstein
alt	photograph
birth date	April 26, 1889
birth place	Vienna, Austria
death date	April 29, 1951
death place	Cambridge, England
death cause	Prostate cancer
resting place	Ascension Parish Burial Ground, Cambridge
resting place coordinates
known for	Private language argument, language-game, family resemblance, picture theory of language, forms of life
education	PhD (Cantab)
alma mater	Berlin Technische Hochschule; Victoria University of Manchester; University of Cambridge
notable works	''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' (1921) ''Philosophical Investigations'' (1953)
occupation	Philosopher, soldier, school teacher, gardener, hospital porter
parents	Karl Wittgenstein and Leopoldine Kalmus
relations	Paul Wittgenstein (brother), Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (sister)
website	The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of BergenThe Cambridge Wittgenstein Archive }}

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who held the professorship in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947. He is known for having inspired two of the century's principal philosophical movements, logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, though in his lifetime he published just one book review, one article, a children's dictionary, and the 75-page ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' (1921). In 1999 his posthumously published ''Philosophical Investigations'' (1953) was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy.

Born into one of Austria-Hungary's wealthiest families in Vienna at the turn of the century, he gave away his inheritance, and was at one point forced to sell his furniture to cover expenses when working on the ''Tractatus''. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Wittgenstein and the remaining brother contemplating it too. Bertrand Russell described him as the most perfect example of genius, "passionate, profound, intense, and dominating", while Richard Rorty wrote that he took out his intense self-loathing on everyone he met. He grew angry when his students wanted to teach philosophy, and was famously overjoyed when G. E. Moore's wife told him she was working in a jam factory—doing something useful, in Wittgenstein's eyes.

He tried to leave philosophy himself several times, serving during the First World War on the front lines with the Austrian Army, and commended for his courage; teaching in schools in Austrian villages, where he found himself in trouble for hitting the children; and working during the Second World War as an orderly in Guy's Hospital, London, where only a few of the staff were told that the new porter was a famous philosopher.

His work is often divided between his early period, exemplified by the ''Tractatus'', and latter period, articulated in the ''Philosophical Investigations''. The early Wittgenstein was concerned with the relationship between propositions and the world, and hoped that by providing an account of this relationship all philosophical problems could be solved; these problems arise, he thought, because the logic of language is not evident in our ordinary use of language. The later Wittgenstein rejected many of the conclusions of the ''Tractatus'', arguing that language is a kind of motley of language-games in which the meaning of words is derived from their public use. Despite the differences between his early and later work, the similarities include a conception of philosophy as a kind of therapy, a concern for ethical and religious issues, and a literary style often described as poetic. Terry Eagleton called him the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists.

Background

The Wittgensteins

According to a family tree prepared in Jerusalem after the Second World War, Wittgenstein's paternal great-grandfather was Moses Meier, a Jewish land agent who lived with his wife, Brendel Simon, in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. In July 1808, Napoleon issued a decree that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname, and so Meier's son, also Moses, took the name of his employers, the Sayn-Wittgensteins, and became Moses Meier Wittgenstein. His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein—who took the middle name "Christian" to distance himself from his Jewish background—married Fanny Figdor, also Jewish, who converted to Protestantism just before they married, and the couple went on to found a successful business trading in wool in Leipzig, far from their Jewish origins. Ludwig's grandmother, Fanny Figdor, was a first cousin of the famous violinist Joseph Joachim. They had 11 children—all forbidden by Hermann to marry Jews—among them Wittgenstein's father, Karl, who by the late 1880s was one of the richest men in the Austro-Hungarian empire, with a fortune in iron and steel. Thanks to Karl, the Wittgensteins became the Austrian equivalents of the Krupps or Rothschilds; as a result of his decision in 1898 to transfer all his investments overseas, the family was shielded from the hyperinflation that hit Austria after World War I.

Early life

Wittgenstein was born to Karl and his wife, Leopoldine Kalmus—Jewish on her father's side and Roman Catholic on her mother's—at 8:30 in the evening on 26 April 1889 in the Palais Wittgenstein at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the Karlskirche. Karl and Poldi, as she was known, had nine children in all. There were four girls: Hermine, Margaret (Gretl)—who was analysed by Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s—Helene, and a fourth daughter who died as a baby; and five boys: Johannes (Hans), Kurt, Rudolf (Rudi), and Paul, who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in the war, and for whom a number of composers wrote works for left hand (the most famous of which was Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand). Ludwig was the youngest of the family.

The children were baptized as Catholics, and raised in an exceptionally intense environment. The family sat at the center of Vienna's cultural life, with Bruno Walter describing life at Palais Wittgenstein as an "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture". Karl was a leading patron of the arts, commissioning works by Auguste Rodin and financing the city's exhibition hall and art gallery, the Secession Building. Gustav Klimt painted Wittgenstein's sister for her wedding portrait, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family's numerous music rooms, though Alexander Waugh writes that the firstborn, Hermine, was so nervous of Brahms that, when once invited to sit with him at dinner, she spent most of the evening in one of the bathrooms.

For Wittgenstein who highly valued precision and discipline, contemporary music was never considered acceptable at all. "Music", he said to his friend Drury in 1930, "came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery."

Family temperament; brothers' suicides

Ray Monk writes that Karl's aim was to turn his sons into captains of industry; they were not sent to school lest they acquire bad habits, but were educated at home to prepare them for work in Karl's business empire. Instead, Anthony Kenny writes, three of them committed suicide, Paul became a concert pianist, and Ludwig a philosopher after a brief period as an engineer. The Irish psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald argues that Karl was a harsh perfectionist who lacked empathy, and that Wittgenstein's mother was anxious and insecure, unable to stand up to her husband. Whatever the reason for it, the family appeared to have a strong streak of depression running through it, or what Anthony Gottlieb called bad temper and extreme nervous tension. He tells a story about Paul practicing on one of the family's seven grand pianos, when he suddenly shouted at Ludwig in the next room: "I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!" Fitzgerald and the Swedish psychiatrist Christopher Gillberg argue that Wittgenstein showed several features of high-functioning autism; German psychiatrist Sula Wolff suggests he suffered from schizoid personality disorder.

The eldest brother, Hans, may also have suffered from autism. Alexander Waugh writes that the boy's first word was "Oedipus". At the age of four, Waugh writes, Hans could identify the Doppler effect in a passing siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch, and at five started crying "Wrong! Wrong!" when two brass bands in a carnival played the same tune in different keys. He was hailed as a musical genius; he died in mysterious circumstances in May 1902, when he ran away to America then disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay, likely a suicide.

Exactly a year later, aged 22 and studying chemistry at the Berlin Academy, Waugh writes that Rudi walked into a bar on the Brandenburgstrasse, asked the pianist to play Thomas Koschat's "Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich", then mixed himself a drink of milk and potassium cyanide, dying in agony. He left several suicide notes, one to his parents that said he was grieving over the death of a friend, and another that referred to his "perverted disposition". It was reported at the time that he had sought advice from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization that was campaigning against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which from 1871 until 1969 forbade homosexual sex. His father forbade the family from ever mentioning his name again.

Monk writes that Kurt did become a company director briefly, but shot himself on 27 October 1918 at the end of the First World War, when the Austrian troops he was commanding refused to obey his orders and deserted ''en masse''. According to Gottlieb, Hermine had said Kurt seemed to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself". Paul also considered suicide, as did Ludwig. The latter told a friend, David Pinsent, that when Bertrand Russell first encouraged him in his philosophy in January 1912, it had ended nine years of loneliness and wanting to die, though Russell was so worried about his state of mind that he predicted Wittgenstein would kill himself by February 1914.

1903–1906: Realschule in Linz

School years

After the deaths of Hans and Rudi, Karl relented, and allowed Paul and Ludwig to be sent to school. Alexander Waugh writes that it was too late for Wittgenstein to pass his exams for the more academic Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt; he failed his entrance exam and only barely managed after extra tuition to pass the exam for the more technically oriented K.u.k. Realschule in Linz, a small state school with 300 pupils, and according to Brian McGuinness a stronghold of German nationalism. In 1903, when he was 13, he began three years of schooling there, lodging nearby in term time with the family of a Dr Srigl, a master at the local gymnasium, the family giving him the nickname Luki.

Historian Brigitte Hamann writes that he stood out from the other boys and was bullied; he spoke an unusually pure form of High German with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable. His first impressions of the school, recorded in fragmentary form in a notebook, indicate there may have been an early romantic relationship with Dr. Stigl's son, Pepi, who died in August 1914: "''Mist!'' [Rubbish!] Relation to the Jews. Relation to Pepi. Love and pride. Knocking hat off. Break with P. Suffering in class."

According to Waugh, Wittgenstein was a misfit at the school, insisting the other children address him with the formal German "Sie", and was often absent. Monk writes that the other boys made fun of him, singing after him: "''Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts''" ("Wittgenstein strolls wistfully Vienna-wards due to adverse winds"). In his leaving certificate, he received a top mark only once, in religious studies; a 2 for conduct and English, 3 for French, geography, history, mathematics and physics, and 4 for German, chemistry, geometry and freehand drawing. He had particular difficulty with spelling and failed his written German exam because of it. He wrote in 1931: "My bad spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study)."

Jewish background and Hitler

There is much debate about the extent to which Wittgenstein and his siblings, who were of 3/4 Jewish descent, saw themselves as Jews, and the issue has arisen in particular regarding Wittgenstein's schooldays, because Adolf Hitler was at the same school for part of the same time. Laurence Goldstein argues it is "overwhelmingly probable" the boys met each other: that Hitler, vicious and aggressive, would have hated and envied Wittgenstein, a "stammering, precocious, precious, aristocratic upstart ..." Other commentators have dismissed as irresponsible and uninformed any suggestion that Wittgenstein's wealth and unusual personality may have fed Hitler's antisemitism, in part because there is no indication that Hitler would have seen Wittgenstein as Jewish.

Vienna was at that time one of the most antisemitic cities in Europe, and any hint of a Jewish heritage had the potential to weigh heavily on a family. Certainly the Wittgenstein children were aware of their ancestry. Paul had created a family tree showing their descent from the Chief Rabbi Samson Wertheimer (1678–1724), the banker Samuel Oppenheimer (1678–1724), and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) and Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). There was nevertheless a streak of antisemitism among them. Wittgenstein famously compared the Jewish people to a ''Beule'' (boil or tumour) on Austrian society. His grandfather, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, himself a Jew, had refused to allow his children to marry other Jews, and Wittgenstein's father had said that "in matters of honour one does not consult a Jew." McGuinness argues that Wittgenstein saw himself as completely German—Ray Monk writes that when Ludwig and Paul wanted to join a gym in Vienna that was restricted to those of Aryan origin, Ludwig was willing to lie about his background, whereas Paul was not.

Wittgenstein and Hitler were born just six days apart, though Hitler had been held back a year, while Wittgenstein was moved forward by one, so they ended up two grades apart at the ''Realschule''. Monk estimates they were both at the school during the 1904–1905 school year, but says there is no evidence they had anything to do with each other. Hitler referred in ''Mein Kampf'' to a Jewish boy at the school, but there were 17 Jews there at the time: "At the Realschule I knew one Jewish boy. We were all on our guard in our relations with him, but only because his reticence and certain actions of his warned us to be discreet. Beyond that my companions and myself formed no particular opinion in regard to him." Several commentators have argued that a school photograph of Hitler (see above right; Hitler is on the top right) may show Wittgenstein in the lower left corner, but Hamann says the photograph stems from 1900 or 1901, before Wittgenstein's time.

In his own writings Wittgenstein frequently referred to himself as Jewish, albeit often in an apparently negative sense. For example, while berating himself for being a "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" thinker, he attributed this to his own Jewish sense of identity, writing: "The saint is the only Jewish genius. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance)". While Wittgenstein would later claim that "[m]y thoughts are 100% Hebraic", as Hans Sluga has argued, if so, "his was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in Weininger's case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius."

Loss of faith

It was while he was at the ''Realschule'' that he decided he had lost his faith in God, or rather had had none to begin with, and that he could not believe any of the things a Christian was supposed to believe. He nevertheless clung to the importance of the idea of confession, something he engaged in several times throughout his life, where he confessed to friends and family that he had lied, or had said or done something that meant he had not been true to himself. He wrote in his diaries about having made a major confession to his oldest sister, Hermine, while he was at the ''Realschule''; Monk writes that it may have been about his loss of faith. He also discussed it with Gretl, his other sister, who directed him to Arthur Schopenhauer's ''The World as Will and Representation''. Schopenhauer's idealism is a version of Immanuel Kant's: that the phenomenal world we experience is mere appearance, and only the will grants access to true reality, or the thing-in-itself. Wittgenstein adopted this view until he abandoned it when he began to study Gottlob Frege and logic, just before he went to Cambridge, though Monk writes he returned to it in the ''Tractatus'', where his views on idealism and realism collided.

Influence of Otto Weininger

During Wittgenstein's first term at the ''Realschule'', on 3 October 1903, the Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger rented the room in the house at Schwarzspanierstrasse 15, Vienna, that Beethoven had died in, and shot himself. His book ''Geschlecht und Charakter'' (Sex and Character) had been published to mostly terrible reviews a few months earlier, but it had received a great review from August Strindberg; that and his suicide turned Weininger into a cult figure, and someone Wittgenstein came to admire. Monk writes that Wittgenstein was ashamed that he had not also killed himself, seeing Weininger's suicide as an ethical deed in a rotten world—a world that Weininger saw composed of superficial anarchy and a materialist interpretation of history, where there are no great philosophers or artists, and where genius is a form of madness—and recommended to everyone that they read Weininger's book.

Weininger argued that the concepts male and female exist only as Platonic forms, and that the essence of woman is sexual. Whereas men are basically rational, women operate only at the level of their emotions and sexual organs; Jews are similar, saturated with femininity, with no sense of right and wrong, and no soul. Wittgenstein saw in this argument the answers to issues he had been struggling with. Weininger argues that man must choose between his masculine and feminine sides, consciousness and unconsciousness, Platonic love and sexuality. Love and sexual desire stand in contradiction, and the love between a woman and a man is therefore doomed to misery or immorality. The only life worth living is the spiritual one—to live as a woman or a Jew means one has no right to live at all; the choice is genius or death. Monk writes that Wittgenstein's thoughts of suicide, which receded to some extent only when Russell began to admire his work in 1912, suggest he had embraced Weininger's bleak outlook.

1906–1913: University

Engineering at Berlin and Manchester

He began his studies in mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, Berlin, on 23 October 1906, lodging with the family of a professor there, Dr Jolles. He attended for three semesters, and was awarded a diploma on 5 May 1908, after developing an interest in aeronautics. He arrived at the Victoria University of Manchester in the spring of 1908 to do his doctorate, full of plans for aeronautical projects, including designing and flying his own plane. He conducted research into the behavior of kites in the upper atmosphere, experimenting at a meteorological observation site near Glossop, and living nearby at the Grouse Inn, a pub on Chunal Road, Derbyshire, where he was one of only two guests, along with a Mr. Rimmer. He told Hermine he loved the isolation of the Grouse Inn, but was less enamored of the toilet facilities. He also worked on the design of a propeller with small jet engines on the end of its blades, something he patented in 1911 and which earned him a research studentship from the university in the autumn of 1908.

It was around this time that he became interested in the foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading Bertrand Russell's ''The Principles of Mathematics'' (1903), and Gottlob Frege's ''Grundgesetze der Arithmetik'', vol. 1 (1893) and vol. 2 (1903). Wittgenstein's sister Hermine said he became obsessed with mathematics as a result, and was anyway losing interest in aeronautics. He decided instead that he needed to study philosophy, describing himself as in a "constant, indescribable, almost pathological state of agitation". In the summer of 1911 he decided to visit Frege at the University of Jena to show him some philosophy he had written, and to ask whether it was worth pursuing; the work did not survive, perhaps because, as he said, Frege wiped the floor with him. He wrote: "I was shown into Frege's study. Frege was a small, neat man with a pointed beard who bounced around the room as he talked. He absolutely wiped the floor with me, and I felt very depressed; but at the end he said 'You must come again', so I cheered up. I had several discussions with him after that. Frege would never talk about anything but logic and mathematics, if I started on some other subject, he would say something polite and then plunge back into logic and mathematics."

Arrival at Cambridge

Wittgenstein wanted to study with Frege, but Frege suggested he attend the University of Cambridge to study under Russell, so on 18 October 1911 Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in Trinity College. Russell was having tea with C.K. Ogden, when, according to Russell, "... an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. He turned out to be a man who had learned engineering at Charlottenburg, but during this course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics & has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me." He was soon not only attending Russell's lectures, but dominating them. The lectures were poorly attended and Russell often found himself lecturing only to C.D. Broad, E.H. Neville, and H.T.J. Norton, so he was quite pleased at first when Wittgenstein turned up, though less so as the weeks wore on. Wittgenstein started following him after lectures back to his rooms to discuss more philosophy, until it was time for the evening meal in Hall. Russell grew irritated; he wrote to his lover Lady Ottoline Morrell: "My German friend threatens to be an infliction."

Russell revised his opinion, and in fact came to be overpowered by Wittgenstein's forceful personality. He wrote in November 1911 that he had at first thought Wittgenstein might be a crank, but soon decided he was a genius: "Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: 'There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced." Three months after Wittgenstein's arrival he told Morrell: "I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve ... He is ''the'' young man one hopes for." The role-reversal between him and Wittgenstein was such that he wrote in 1916, after Wittgenstein had criticized his own work: "His criticism, 'tho I don't think he realized it at the time, was an event of first-rate importance in my life, and affected everything I have done since. I saw that he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy."

Moral Sciences Club and Apostles

In 1912 Wittgenstein joined the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, an influential discussion group for philosophy dons and students, delivering his first paper there on 29 November that year, a four-minute talk defining philosophy as "all those primitive propositions which are assumed as true without proof by the various sciences." From that point on he dominated the society, to the point where special starred meetings had to be organized which dons were not to attend, though everyone knew the arrangement was directed only at Wittgenstein. He had to stop attending entirely in the 1930s after complaints that he gave no one else a chance to speak.

The club became legendary within philosophy because of a meeting on 25 October 1946 at Richard Braithwaite's rooms in King's, where Karl Popper, another Viennese philosopher, had been invited as the guest speaker. Popper's paper was "Are there philosophical problems?", in which he struck up a position against Wittgenstein's, contending that problems in philosophy are real, not just linguistic puzzles as Wittgenstein argued. Accounts vary as to what happened next, but Wittgenstein was apparently infuriated and started waving a hot poker at Popper, demanding that Popper give him an example of a moral rule. Popper offered one—"Not to threaten visiting speakers with pokers"—at which point Russell had to tell Wittgenstein to put the poker down and Wittgenstein stormed out. It was the only time the philosophers, three of the most eminent in the world, were ever in the same room together. The minutes record that the meeting was "charged to an unusual degree with a spirit of controversy".

John Maynard Keynes also invited him to join the Cambridge Apostles, an elite secret society formed in 1820, which both Russell and G.E. Moore had joined as students, but Wittgenstein did not enjoy it and attended infrequently. Russell had been worried that Wittgenstein, with his literal-mindedness, would not appreciate the group's humour or the fact that the members were in love with one another. Lytton Strachey wrote to Keynes on 17 May 1912 about an Apostles meeting where Wittgenstein was present, calling him Herr Sinckel-Winckel: "Oliver and Herr Sinckel-Winckel hard at it on universals and particulars. The latter oh! so bright—but quelle souffrance! Oh God! God! "If A loves B"—"There may be a common quality"—"Not analysable that way at all, but the complexes have certain qualities." How shall I manage to slink off to bed?"

Relationship with David Pinsent

It was Russell who introduced Wittgenstein to David Hume Pinsent (1891–1918) in the summer of 1912. A mathematics undergraduate and descendant of David Hume, Pinsent became what Wittgenstein called his first and only friend, and is widely regarded as the first of three or four men Wittgenstein fell in love with—followed by Francis Skinner in 1930, Ben Richards in the late 1940s, and to a lesser extent Keith Kirk in 1940—though Pinsent and Kirk did not respond in kind.

The men worked together on experiments in the psychology laboratory about the role of rhythm in the appreciation of music, and Wittgenstein delivered a paper about it to the British Psychological Association in Cambridge in 1912. They also travelled together, including to Iceland in September 1912—the expenses paid by Wittgenstein's father, including first class travel, and new clothes and spending money for Pinsent—and later to Norway. Pinsent's diaries have provided researchers with a wealth of material about Wittgenstein's personality, and what comes across strongly is how sensitive and nervous he was, attuned to the tiniest slight or change in mood from Pinsent, with Pinsent regularly writing that Wittgenstein was in a huff about something. He wrote about shopping for furniture with Wittgenstein in Cambridge when the latter was given rooms in Trinity; most of what they found in the stores was not frugal enough for Wittgenstein's taste: "I went and helped him interview a lot of furniture at various shops ... It was rather amusing: he is terribly fastidious and we led the shopman a frightful dance, Vittgenstein [sic] ejaculating "No—Beastly!" to 90 percent of what he shewed us!"

He wrote in May 1912 that Wittgenstein had just begun to study philosophy: "[h]e expresses the most naive surprise that all the philosophers he once worshipped in ignorance are after all stupid and dishonest and make disgusting mistakes!" The last time they saw each other was at Birmingham train station on 8 October 1913, when they said goodbye before Wittgenstein left to live in Norway. Despite the physical distance that had grown between them because of the war—Pinsent's last letter to Wittgenstein was dated 14 September 1916—when Pinsent died in a plane crash in May 1918, Wittgenstein was distraught to the point of being suicidal, and three years later dedicated the ''Tractatus'' to him.

1913–1920: World War I and the ''Tractatus''

Work on ''Logik''

Karl Wittgenstein died on 20 January 1913, and on receiving his inheritance Wittgenstein became one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He donated some of it, initially anonymously, to Austrian artists and writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by other academics, and so in 1913 he retreated to the village of Skjolden in Norway, where he rented the second floor of a house for the winter. He later saw this as one of the most productive periods of his life, writing ''Logik'' (''Notes on Logic''), the predecessor of much of the ''Tractatus''.

At Wittgenstein's insistence, Moore, who was now a Cambridge don, visited him in Norway in 1914, reluctantly because Wittgenstein exhausted him. David Edmonds and John Eidinow write that Wittgenstein regarded Moore—an internationally known philosopher—as an example of how far someone could get in life with "absolutely no intelligence whatsoever". In Norway it was clear that Moore was expected to act as Wittgenstein's secretary, taking down his notes, with Wittgenstein falling into a rage when Moore got something wrong. When he returned to Cambridge, Moore asked the university to consider accepting ''Logik'' as sufficient for a bachelor's degree, but they refused, saying it wasn't formatted properly: no footnotes, no preface. Wittgenstein was furious, writing to Moore in May 1914: "If I am not worth your making an exception for me ''even in some STUPID details'' then I may as well go to Hell directly; and if I ''am'' worth it and you don't do it then—by God—''you'' might go there." Moore was apparently distraught; he wrote in his diary that he felt sick and could not get the letter out of his head. The two did not speak again until 1929.

Military service

The outbreak of World War I the next year left Wittgenstein in deep shock. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, first serving on a ship and then in an artillery workshop. In March 1916, he was posted to a fighting unit on the front line of the Russian front, as part of the Austrian 7th Army, where his unit was involved in some of the heaviest fighting, defending against the Brusilov Offensive. In action against British troops, he was decorated with the Military Merit with Swords on the Ribbon, and was commended by the army for "courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism". In January 1917, he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won several medals for bravery including the Silver Medal for Valour. In 1918 he was promoted to reserve officer (lieutenant) and sent to northern Italy as part of an artillery regiment. For his part in the Austrian offensive of June 1918, he was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, the highest honour in the Austrian army, but was instead awarded the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords.

Throughout the war, he kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical reflections alongside personal remarks, and in them he records his contempt for the baseness of soldiers in wartime. He discovered Leo Tolstoy's ''The Gospel in Brief'' at a bookshop in Galicia, and carried it everywhere, recommending it to anyone in distress, to the point where he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels". Russell said he returned from the war a changed man, one with both a more mystical and more ascetic bent.

Completion of the ''Tractatus''

In the summer of 1918 Wittgenstein took military leave and went to stay in his family's summer home, Neuwaldegg, in Vienna. It was there in August 1918 that he completed the ''Tractatus'', which he submitted with the title ''Der Satz'' (The Proposition) to the publishers Johada and Siegel.

A series of events around this time left him deeply upset. On 13 August, his uncle Paul died. On 25 October he learned that Johada and Siegel had decided not to publish the ''Tractatus'', and on 27 October his brother Kurt killed himself, the third of his brothers to commit suicide. It was around this time he received a letter from David Pinsent's mother to say that Pinsent had been killed in a plane crash on 8 May. Wittgenstein was distraught to the point of being suicidal. He was sent back to the Italian front after his leave and was captured on 3 November in Trent, spending nine months in prison. He returned to his family in Vienna on 25 August 1919, by all accounts physically and mentally spent. He apparently talked incessantly about suicide, terrifying his sisters and Paul. He decided to do two things: to enroll in teacher training college as an elementary school teacher, and to get rid of his fortune. In 1914 it had been providing him with an income of 300,000 Kronen a year, but by 1919 was worth a great deal more because it had been invested in the United States and Holland. He divided it among his siblings, except for Margarete who was already wealthy in her own right, insisting that it not be held in trust for him. His family saw him as ill, and acquiesced.

1920–1928: Teaching, the ''Tractatus'', Haus Wittgenstein

Teacher training in Vienna, the Prater

In September 1919 he enrolled in the ''Lehrerbildungsanstalt'' (teacher training college) in the ''Kundmanngasse'' in Vienna. His sister Hermine said that Wittgenstein working as an elementary teacher was like using a precision instrument to open crates, but the family decided not to interfere.

He moved out of the family home and into lodgings in ''Untere Viaduktgasse'' in Vienna's third district, and it was during this period that, according to William Warren Bartley, a professor of philosophy at Stanford, Wittgenstein engaged in a series of casual homosexual encounters in an area of the city called the ''Prater'', within walking distance of his lodgings. It is a controversial claim, one that Bartley first made in 1973 in his biography ''Wittgenstein'', and denied at the time by Wittgenstein's executors and friends in England. Bartley writes that he obtained the information from Wittgenstein's friends, and it was this activity, he argues, that Wittgenstein was referring to when he wrote to the architect Paul Engelmann in May 1920: "Things have gone utterly miserably for me lately. Of course only because of my own baseness and rottenness. I have continually thought about taking my own life, and now too this thought still haunts me. 'I have sunk to the bottom'. May you never be in that position!" The literary executors threatened legal action to suppress publication of Bartley's book, according to an afterword he included in a 1985 edition. Bartley writes that a whispering campaign began against him, with one British literary critic writing, "The general line here is that you are to be drummed out of the trade and that no academic invitation of any kind will be extended to you from the United Kingdom henceforth ..."

Teaching posts in Austria

In 1920 Wittgenstein was given his first job as a primary school teacher in Trattenbach, a village of just a few hundred. His first letters describe it as beautiful, but in October 1921, he wrote to Russell: "I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere." He was soon the object of gossip among the villagers, who found him eccentric at best. He did not get on well with the other teachers; when he found his lodgings too noisy, he made a bed for himself in the school kitchen. He was an enthusiastic teacher, offering late-night extra tuition to several of the boys, something that did not endear him to the parents, though some of the boys came to adore him; his sister Hermine occasionally watched him teach and said the students "literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations".

To the less abled, it seems that he became something of a tyrant. The first two hours of each day were devoted to mathematics, hours that Monk writes some of the pupils recalled years later with horror. They reported that he caned the boys and boxed their ears, and also that he pulled the girls' hair; this was not unusual at the time for boys, but for the villagers he went too far in doing it to the girls too; girls were not expected to understand algebra, much less have their ears boxed over it. The physicality apart, Monk writes that he quickly became a village legend, shouting "''Krautsalat!''" when the headmaster played the piano, and "Nonsense!" when a priest was answering children's questions.

Publication of the ''Tractatus''

{|class="toccolours" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 85%; background:#white; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 40%;" cellspacing="5" |style="text-align: left;"| "The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by prop[osition]s—i.e. by language—(and, which comes to the same thing, what can be ''thought'') and what can not be expressed by pro[position]s, but only shown (gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy." |- |style="text-align: left;" |— Wittgenstein, letter to Russell, 19 August 1919. |} While Wittgenstein was living in isolation in rural Austria, the ''Tractatus'' was published to considerable interest, first in German in 1921 as ''Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung'', part of Wilhelm Ostwald's journal ''Annalen der Naturphilosophie'', though Wittgenstein was not happy with the result and called it a pirate edition. Russell had agreed to write an introduction to explain why it was important, because it was otherwise unlikely to have been published: it was difficult if not impossible to understand, and Wittgenstein was unknown in philosophy. But Wittgenstein was not happy with Russell's help. He had lost faith in Russell, finding him glib and his philosophy mechanistic, and felt he had fundamentally misunderstood the ''Tractatus''.

An English translation was prepared in Cambridge by Frank Ramsey, a mathematics undergraduate at King's commissioned by C. K. Ogden. It was G.E. Moore who suggested ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' for the title, an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's ''Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.'' Initially there were difficulties in finding a publisher for the English edition too, because Wittgenstein was insisting it appear without Russell's introduction; Cambridge University Press turned it down for that reason. Finally in 1922 an agreement was reached with Wittgenstein that Kegan Paul would print a bilingual edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation. This is the translation that was approved by Wittgenstein, but it is problematic in a number of ways. Wittgenstein's English was poor at the time, and Ramsey was a teenager who had only recently learned German, so philosophers often prefer to use a 1961 translation by David Pears and Brian McGuinness.

The aim of the ''Tractatus'' is to reveal the relationship between language and the world: what can be said about it, and what can only be shown. Wittgenstein argues that language has an underlying logical structure, a structure that provides the limits of what can be said meaningfully, and therefore the limits of what can be thought. The limits of language, for Wittgenstein, are the limits of thought. Much of philosophy involves attempts to say the unsayable, and by implication the unthinkable: "what can we say at all can be said clearly", he argues. Anything beyond that—religion, ethics, aesthetics, the mystical—cannot be discussed. They are not in themselves nonsensical, but any statement about them must be. He wrote in the preface: "The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)."

The book is devoted to explaining what a meaningful proposition is (what is asserted when a sentence is used meaningfully). It is 75 pages long—"As to the shortness of the book, I am ''awfully sorry for it'' ... If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me", he told Ogden—and presents seven numbered propositions (1–7), with various sub-levels (1, 1.1, 1.11):

#''Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist''. #:The world is all that is the case. # ''Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten''. #:What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs. # ''Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke''. #:A logical picture of facts is a thought. # ''Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz''. #:A thought is a proposition with a sense. # ''Der Satz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze''. #:A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. #''Die allgemeine Form der Wahrheitsfunktion ist: $[\backslash bar\; p,\backslash bar\backslash xi,\; N(\backslash bar\backslash xi)]$. Dies ist die allgemeine Form des Satzes''. #:The general form of a truth-function is: $[\backslash bar\; p,\backslash bar\backslash xi,\; N(\backslash bar\backslash xi)]$. This is the general form of a proposition. #''Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen''. #:What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Visit from Frank Ramsey, Puchberg

In September 1922 he moved to a secondary school in a nearby village, Hassbach, but the people there were just as bad—"These people are not human ''at all'' but loathsome worms", he wrote to a friend—and he left after a month. In November he began work at another primary school, this time in Puchberg in the Schneeberg mountains. There, he told Russell, the villagers were one-quarter animal and three-quarters human. He was miserable. He had no one he could discuss philosophy with, which was particularly frustrating given that the ''Tractatus'' was now the subject of much debate in Cambridge and among the Vienna Circle.

Frank Ramsey arrived to visit him on 17 September 1923 to discuss the ''Tractatus''; he had agreed to write a review of it for ''Mind''. He reported in a letter home that Wittgenstein was living frugally in one tiny whitewashed room that only had space for a bed, washstand, a small table, and one small hard chair. Ramsey shared an evening meal with him of coarse bread, butter, and cocoa. Wittgenstein's school hours were eight to twelve or one, and he had afternoons free. After Ramsey returned to Cambridge a long campaign began among Wittgenstein's friends to persuade him to return to Cambridge and away from what they saw as a hostile environment for him. He was accepting no help even from his family. Ramsey wrote to John Maynard Keynes: "[Wittgenstein's family] are very rich and extremely anxious to give him money or do anything for him in any way, and he rejects all their advances; even Christmas presents or presents of invalid's food, when he is ill, he sends back. And this is not because they aren't on good terms but because he won't have any money he hasn't earned ... It is an awful pity."

Haidbauer incident, Otterthal

He moved schools again in September 1924, this time to Otterthal, near Trattenbach; the socialist headmaster, Josef Putre, was someone Wittgenstein had become friends with while at Trattenbach. While he was there, he wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for the children, ''Wörterbuch für Volksschulen'', published in Vienna in 1926 by Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, the only book of his apart from the ''Tractatus'' that was published in his lifetime. A first edition sold in 2005 for £75,000.

He continued to be the object of gossip and mistrust, in part because he was very demanding of the children. The ''dénouement'' came in April 1926 during what became known as ''Der Vorfall Haidbauer'' (the Haidbauer incident). Josef Haidbauer was an 11-year-old pupil whose father had died and whose mother worked as a local maid. He was a slow learner, and one day Wittgenstein hit him two or three times on the head, causing him to collapse. Wittgenstein carried him to the headmaster's office, then quickly left the school, bumping into a parent, Herr Piribauer, on the way out. Piribauer had been sent for by the children when they saw Haidbauer collapse; Wittgenstein had previously pulled Piribauer's daughter, Hermine, so hard by the ears that her ears had bled. Piribauer said that when he met Wittgenstein in the hall that day: "I called him all the names under the sun. I told him he wasn't a teacher, he was an animal-trainer! And that I was going to fetch the police right away!"

Piribauer tried to have Wittgenstein arrested, but the village's police station was empty, and when he tried again the next day he was told Wittgenstein had disappeared. On 28 April 1926, Wittgenstein handed in his resignation to Wilhelm Kundt, a local school inspector, who tried to persuade him to stay, but Wittgenstein was adamant that his days as a schoolteacher were over. Proceedings were initiated in May, and the judge ordered a psychiatric report; in August 1926 a letter to Wittgenstein from a friend, Ludwig Hänsel, indicates that hearings were ongoing, but nothing is known about the case after that. Alexander Waugh writes that Wittgenstein's family and their money may have had a hand in covering things up. Waugh writes that Haidbauer died shortly afterwards of haemophilia; Monk says he died when he was 14 of leukaemia. Ten years later, Wittgenstein appeared without warning at the homes of the families whose children he had hurt saying he wanted to apologize personally. He visited at least four of the children, including Hermine Piribauer, who apparently replied only with a "Ja, ja", though some of the other children were more forgiving.

Haus Wittgenstein

In part to distract him from the Haidbauer incident Wittgenstein's sister Margaret invited him to help with the design of her new townhouse in Vienna's ''Kundmanngasse''. The architect was Paul Engelmann, someone Wittgenstein had come to know during the war when they'd been in the trenches together. Engelmann designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos: three rectangular blocks. Wittgenstein poured himself into the project for over two years. He focused on the windows, doors, and radiators, demanding that every detail be exactly as he specified, to the point where, as Waugh writes, everyone involved in the project was exhausted. One of the architects, Jacques Groag, wrote in a letter: "I come home very depressed with a headache after a day of the worst quarrels, disputes, vexations, and this happens often. Mostly between me and Wittgenstein." When the house was nearly finished he had a ceiling raised 30mm so that the room had the exact proportions he wanted.

Waugh writes that Margaret eventually refused to pay for the changes Wittgenstein kept demanding, so he bought himself a lottery ticket in the hope of paying for things that way. It took him a year to design the door handles, and another to design the radiators. Each window was covered by a metal screen that weighed 150 kg, moved by a pulley Wittgenstein designed. Bernhard Leitner, author of ''The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein'', said of it that there is barely anything comparable in the history of interior design: "It is as ingenious as it is expensive. A metal curtain that could be lowered into the floor."

The house was finished by December 1928, and the family gathered there that Christmas to celebrate its completion, but it was not greatly admired. Wittgenstein's sister Hermine wrote: "It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods." Paul disliked it, and when Margaret's nephew came to sell it, he reportedly did so on the grounds that she had never liked it either. Wittgenstein himself found the house too austere, saying it had good manners, but no primordial life or health. He nevertheless seemed committed to the idea of becoming an architect: the Vienna City Directory listed him as "Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, occupation: architect" between 1933 and 1938. After World War II, the house became a barracks and stables for Russian soldiers, and in the 1950s it was sold to a developer. The Vienna Landmark Commission saved it and made it a national monument in 1971, and since 1975 it has housed the cultural department of the Bulgarian Embassy.

1929–1941: Fellowship at Cambridge

PhD and fellowship

At the urging of Ramsey and others, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929. Keynes wrote in a letter to his wife: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train." Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge as he did not have a degree, so he applied as an advanced undergraduate. Russell noted that his previous residency was sufficient for a PhD, and urged him to offer the ''Tractatus'' as his thesis. It was examined in 1929 by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defence, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." Moore wrote in the examiner's report: "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree." Wittgenstein was appointed as a lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College.

Anschluss

From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, where he worked on the ''Philosophical Investigations''. In the winter of 1936/37, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most of them about minor infractions like white lies, in an effort to cleanse himself. In 1938, he travelled to Ireland to visit Maurice O'Connor Drury, a friend who became a psychiatrist, and considered such training himself, with the intention of abandoning philosophy for it. The visit to Ireland was at the same time a response to the invitation of the then Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, himself a mathematics teacher. De Valera hoped that Wittgenstein's presence would contribute to an academy for advanced mathematics.

While he was in Ireland in March 1938, Germany annexed Austria in the ''Anschluss''; the Viennese Wittgenstein was now a citizen of the enlarged Germany and a Jew under the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, because three of his grandparents had been born as Jews. The Nuremberg Laws classified people as Jews (''Volljuden'') if they had three or four Jewish grandparents, and as mixed blood (''Mischling'') if they had one or two. It meant ''inter alia'' that the Wittgensteins were restricted in who they could marry or have sex with, and where they could work.

After Anschluss, Paul left almost immediately for England, and later the United States. The Nazis discovered his relationship with Hilde Schania, a brewer’s daughter he had had two children with but had never married, though he did later. Because she was not a Jew, he was served with a summons for ''Rassenschande'' (racial defilement). He told no one he was leaving the country, except for Hilde who agreed to follow him. He left so suddenly and quietly that for a time people believed he was the fourth Wittgenstein brother to have committed suicide.

Wittgenstein began to investigate acquiring British or Irish citizenship with the help of Keynes, and apparently had to confess to his friends in England that he had earlier misrepresented himself to them as having just one Jewish grandparent, when in fact he had three.

A few days before the invasion of Poland, Hitler granted ''Mischling'' status to the Wittgenstein siblings. In 1939 there were 2,100 applications for this, and Hitler granted only 12. Anthony Gottlieb writes that the pretext was that their paternal grandfather had been the bastard son of a German prince, which allowed the Reichsbank to claim the gold, foreign currency, and stocks held in Switzerland by a Wittgenstein trust. Gretl, an American citizen by marriage, was the one who started the negotiations over the racial status of their grandfather, and the family's foreign currency was used as a bargaining tool. Paul had escaped to Switzerland and then the United States in July 1938, and disagreed with the negotiations, leading to a permanent split between the siblings. After the war, when Paul was performing in Vienna, he did not visit Hermine who was dying there, and he had no further contact with Ludwig or Gretl.

Professor of philosophy

After G. E. Moore resigned the chair in philosophy in 1939, Wittgenstein was elected, and acquired British citizenship soon afterwards. In July 1939 he travelled to Vienna to assist Gretl and his other sisters, visiting Berlin for one day to meet an official of the Reichsbank. After this, he travelled to New York to persuade Paul, whose agreement was required, to back the scheme. The required Befreiung was granted in August 1939. The unknown amount signed over to the Nazis by the Wittgenstein family, a week or so before the outbreak of war, included amongst many other assets 1.7 tonnes of gold. At 2009 prices, this amount of gold alone would be worth in excess of US$60 million. There is also a report that Wittgenstein went on to visit Moscow a second time in 1939, travelling from Berlin, and again met the philosopher Sophia Janowskaya.

After work, Wittgenstein would often relax by watching Westerns, where he preferred to sit at the very front of the cinema, or reading detective stories. Norman Malcolm wrote that he would rush to the cinema when class ended. "As the members of the class began to move their chairs out of the room he might look imploringly at a friend and say in a low tone, ‘Could you go to a flick?’ On the way to the cinema Wittgenstein would buy a bun or cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film."

By this time, Wittgenstein's view on the foundations of mathematics had changed considerably. Earlier he had thought that logic could provide a solid foundation, and he had even considered updating Russell and Whitehead's ''Principia Mathematica''. Now he denied that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and he denied that mathematical statements were true in any real sense. He gave a series of lectures on mathematics, discussing this and other topics, documented in a book, with lectures by Wittgenstein and discussions between him and several students, including the young Alan Turing.

World War II and Guy's Hospital

Monk writes that Wittgenstein found it intolerable that a war was going on and he was teaching philosophy. He grew angry when any of his students wanted to pursue philosophy, and was famously overjoyed when the wife of philosopher G.E. Moore told him she was working in a jam factory—doing something useful, in Wittgenstein's eyes. In September 1941 he asked John Ryle, the brother of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, if he could get a manual job at Guy's Hospital in London. John Ryle was professor of medicine at Cambridge and had been involved in helping Guy's prepare for the Blitz. Wittgenstein told Ryle he would die slowly if left at Cambridge, and he would rather die quickly. He started working at Guy's shortly afterwards as a dispensary porter, meaning that he delivered drugs from the pharmacy to the wards—where he apparently advised the patients not to take them.

The hospital staff were not told that he was one of the world's most famous philosophers, though some of the medical staff did recognize him—at least one had attended Moral Sciences Club meetings—but they were discreet. "Good God, don't tell anybody who I am!" Wittgenstein begged one of them. Some of them nevertheless called him Professor Wittgenstein, and he was allowed to dine with the doctors. He was lonely. He wrote on 1 April 1942: "I no longer feel any hope for the future of my life. It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless."

He had developed a friendship with Keith Kirk, a working-class teenage friend of Francis Skinner, the mathematics undergraduate he had had a relationship with until Skinner's death in 1941 from polio. Skinner had given up academia, thanks at least in part to Wittgenstein's influence, and had been working as a mechanic in 1939, with Kirk as his apprentice. Kirk and Wittgenstein struck up a friendship, with Wittgenstein giving him lessons in physics to help him pass a City and Guilds exam, but Wittgenstein seems to have fallen in love with him. During his period of loneliness at Guy's he wrote in his diary: "For ten days I've heard nothing more from K, even though I pressed him a week ago for news. I think that he has perhaps broken with me. A ''tragic'' thought." Kirk had in fact got married, and they never saw one another again.

1947–1951: Final years

{|class="toccolours" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 85%; background:#white; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 40%;" cellspacing="5" |style="text-align: left;"| "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." |- |style="text-align: left;" |— Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431 |} He resigned the professorship at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing, and travelled to Ireland in 1947 and 1948, staying in Ross's Hotel in Dublin and a farmhouse in Red Cross, in County Wicklow, where he began the manuscript volume MS 137, Band R. Seeking solitude he moved to Rosro, a holiday cottage in Connemara owned by Maurice O'Connor-Drury. Drury told his servant, Tommy Mulkerrins, that Wittgenstein had had a nervous breakdown and needed looking after.

He also accepted an invitation from Norman Malcolm, a former student, to stay with him at Ithaca, New York. He made the trip in April 1949, but told Malcolm he was unwell: "I haven't done any work since the beginning of March & I haven't had the strength of even trying to do any." A doctor in Dublin had diagnosed anaemia and prescribed iron and liver pills, but he fell ill again in America, and told Malcolm he was afraid of dying there. "I don't want to die in America. I am a European. I want to die there. What a fool I was to come!" He returned to London, where he was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer of the prostate, spread to his bone marrow. He was prescribed oestrogen, which gave him diarrhea, hot flashes, impotence, and swelling of the breasts. He spent the next two months in Vienna, where his sister Hermine died on 11 February 1950; he went to see her every day, but she was hardly able to speak or recognize him. "Great loss for me and all of us", he wrote. "Greater than I would have thought." He moved around a lot after Hermine's death: to Cambridge in April 1950, where he stayed with G. H. von Wright; to London to stay with Rush Rhees; then to Oxford to see Elizabeth Anscombe, writing to Norman Malcolm that he was hardly doing any philosophy. He went to Norway in August with Ben Richards, then returned to Cambridge, where on 27 November he moved into "Storey's End", at 76 Storey's Way, the home of his doctor, Edward Bevan, and his wife Joan; he had told them he was scared of dying in hospital, so they said he could spend his last days in their home instead. Joan was at first afraid of him, but they became very close.

By the beginning of 1951 it was clear that he had little time left. He wrote a new will in Oxford on 29 January, naming Rhees as his executor, and Anscombe and von Wright his literary administrators, and wrote to Normal Malcolm that month to say, "My mind's completely dead. This isn't a complaint, for I don't really suffer from it. I know that life must have an end once & and that mental life can cease before the rest does." In February he returned to the Bevans' home to work on MS 175 and MS 176. These and other manuscripts were later published as ''Remarks on Colour'' and ''On Certainty''. He wrote to Malcolm on 16 April, 13 days before his death: "An extraordinary thing happened to me. About a month ago I suddenly found myself in the right frame of mind for doing philosophy. I had been ''absolutely'' certain that I'd never again be able to do it. It's the first time after more than 2 years that the curtain in my brain has gone up.—Of course, so far I've only worked for about 5 weeks & it may be all over by tomorrow; but it bucks me up a lot now."

He began work on his final manuscript, MS 177, on 25 April 1951. It was his 62nd birthday on 26 April. He went for a walk the next afternoon, and wrote his last entry that day, 27 April:

If someone believes that he has flown from America to England in the last few days, then, I believe, he cannot be making a mistake.

And just the same if someone says that he is at this moment sitting at a table and writing.

But even if in such cases I can’t be mistaken, isn't it possible that I am drugged? If I am and if the drug has taken away my consciousness, then I am not now really talking and thinking. I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.

That evening, he became very ill; when his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, "Good!". Joan stayed with him throughout that night, and just before losing consciousness for the last time on 28 April, he told her: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." Norman Malcolm writes that this was a strangely moving utterance, given how unhappy his life seems to have been. Four of his former students arrived at his bedside—Ben Richards, Elizabeth Anscombe, Yorick Smythies, and Maurice O'Connor Drury. Anscombe and Smythies were Catholics, and at the latter's request, a Dominican monk, Father Conrad Pepler, also attended. They were at first unsure what Wittgenstein would have wanted, but then remembered he had said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, so they did, and he was pronounced dead shortly afterwards. He was given a Catholic burial at St. Giles's Church, Cambridge. Drury later said he had been troubled ever since about whether that was the right thing to do.

1953: Publication of the ''Philosophical Investigations''

The ''Blue Book'', a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contains seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language, and is widely read as a turning-point in his philosophy of language.

The ''Philosophical Investigations'' was published in two parts in 1953. Most of the 693 numbered paragraphs in Part I were ready for printing in 1946, but Wittgenstein withdrew the manuscript. The shorter Part II was added by his editors, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees. Wittgenstein asks the reader to think of language as a multiplicity of language-games within which parts of language develop and function. He argues that philosophical problems are bewitchments that arise from philosophers' misguided attempts to consider the meaning of words independently of their context, usage, and grammar, what he called "language gone on holiday".

Philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed. Wittgenstein describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language—the language of the ''Tractatus''—where all philosophical problems can be solved without the muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, precisely because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no work at all. Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the "rough ground" of ordinary language in use. Much of the ''Investigations'' consists of examples of how the first false steps can be avoided, so that philosophical problems are dissolved, rather than solved: "the clarity we are aiming at is indeed ''complete'' clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should ''completely'' disappear."

In popular culture

In 1993 Wittgenstein was the subject of the film ''Wittgenstein'' by the English director Derek Jarman. The film is loosely based on his life story as well as his philosophical thinking. The adult Wittgenstein is played by the Welsh actor Karl Johnson.

Works

A collection of Ludwig Wittgenstein's manuscripts is held by Trinity College, Cambridge.

''Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung'', Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14 (1921)

*''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'', translated by C.K. Ogden (1922)

''Philosophische Untersuchungen'' (1953)

* ''Philosophical Investigations'', translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (1953)

''Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik'', ed. by G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe (1956), a selection of his work on the philosophy of logic and mathematics between 1937 and 1944.

* ''Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics'', translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, rev. ed. (1978)

''Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie'', ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (1980)

* ''Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vols. 1 and 2'', translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (1980), a selection of which makes up ''Zettel''.

''The Blue and Brown Books'' (1958), notes dictated in English to Cambridge students in 1933–1935.

''Philosophische Bemerkungen'', ed. by Rush Rhees (1964)

* ''Philosophical Remarks'' (1975)

* ''Philosophical Grammar'' (1978)

''Bemerkungen über die Farben'', ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe (1977)

* ''Remarks on Colour'' (1991), remarks on Goethe's ''Theory of Colours''.

''On Certainty'', collection of aphorisms discussing the relation between knowledge and certainty, extremely influential in the philosophy of action.

''Culture and Value'', collection of personal remarks about various cultural issues, such as religion and music, as well as critique of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy.

''Zettel'', collection of Wittgenstein's thoughts in fragmentary/"diary entry" format as with ''On Certainty'' and ''Culture and Value''.

;Works online

Review of P. Coffey's ''Science of Logic'' (1913): a polemical book review, written in 1912 for the March 1913 issue of ''The Cambridge Review'' when Wittgenstein was an undergraduate studying with Russell. The review is the earliest public record of Wittgenstein's philosophical views.

''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' (1922/1923), German text and Ogden-Ramsey translation

Wittgenstein Source: 5 000 pages of the Wittgenstein Nachlass online

Google Edition of Remarks on Colour

Some Remarks on Logical Form

Cambridge (1932–3) lecture notes

The Blue Book

Lecture on Ethics

On Certainty

Notes

References

Bartley, William Warren. ''Wittgenstein''. Open Court, 1994, first published 1973.

Barrett, Cyril. ''Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief''. Blackwell, 1991.

Beaney, Michael (ed.). ''The Frege Reader''. Blackwell, 1997.

Braithwaite, R.B. "George Edward Moore, 1873 - 1958", in Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz. (eds.). ''G.E. Moore: Essays in Retrospect''. Allen & Unwin, 1970.

Diamond, Cora (ed.). ''Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics''. University Of Chicago Press, 1989.

Creegan, Charles. ''Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical Method''. Routledge, 1989.

Drury, Maurice O'Connor et al. ''The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein''. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

Drury, Maurice O'Connor. "Conversations with Wittgenstein", in Rush Rhees (ed.). ''Recollections of Wittgenstein: Hermine Wittgenstein--Fania Pascal--F.R. Leavis--John King--M. O'C. Drury''. Oxford University Press, 1984.

Edmonds, David and Eidinow, John. ''Wittgenstein's Poker''. Ecco, 2001.

Edwards, James C. ''Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life''. University Presses of Florida, 1982.

Gellner, Ernest. ''Words and Things''. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, originally published 1959.

Goldstein, Laurence. ''Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and his Relevance to Modern Thought''. Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.

Hamann, Brigitte and Thornton, Thomas. ''Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship''. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kanterian, Edward. ''Ludwig Wittgenstein''. Reaktion Books, 2007.

Klagge, James Carl. ''Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy''. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Klagge, James Carl and Nordmann, Alfred (eds.). ''Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions''. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Kripke, Saul. ''Wittgenstein on rules and private language: an elementary exposition''. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Leitner, Bernhard. ''The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Documentation''. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1973.

Malcolm, Norman. ''Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir''. Oxford University Press, 1958.

McGuinness, Brian. ''Wittgenstein: A Life : Young Ludwig 1889-1921''. University of California Press, 1988.

Monk, Ray. ''Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius''. Free Press, 1990.

Nedo, Michael and Ranchetti, Michele (eds.). ''Ludwig Wittgenstein: sein Leben in Bildern und Texten''. Suhrkamp, 1983.

Perloff, Marjorie. ''Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary''. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Peterman, James F. ''Philosophy as therapy''. SUNY Press, 1992.

Russell, Bertrand. ''Autobiography''. Routledge, 1998.

Russell, Bertrand. "Introduction", ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'', May 1922.

Shanker, S., & Shanker, V. A. (eds.). ''Ludwig Wittgenstein: Critical Assessments''. Croom Helm, 1986.

Sluga, Hans D. (ed.). ''The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein''. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Waugh, Alexander. ''The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War''. Random House of Canada, 2008.

Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand. ''Principia Mathematica''. Cambridge University Press, first published 1910.

Further reading

; Bergen and Cambridge archives

Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, accessed 16 September 2010.

:* Wittgenstein News, University of Bergen, accessed 16 September 2010. :* Wittgenstein Source, University of Bergen, accessed 16 September 2010.

The Cambridge Wittgenstein Archive, accessed 16 September 2010.

; Papers about his ''Nachlass''

Stern, David. "The Bergen Electronic Edition of Wittgenstein's ''Nachlass''", ''The European Journal of Philosophy''. Vol 18, issue 3, September 2010.

Von Wright. G.H. "The Wittgenstein Papers", ''The Philosophical Review''. 78, 1969.

;Other

Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. ''Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning''. Blackwell, 1980.

Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. ''Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar, and Necessity''. Blackwell, 1985.

Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. ''Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind''. Blackwell, 1990.

Brockhaus, Richard R. ''Pulling Up the Ladder: The Metaphysical Roots of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus''. Open Court, 1990.

Engelmann, Paul. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein. Basil Blackwell, 1967

Fraser, Giles. "Investigating Wittgenstein, part 1: Falling in love", ''The Guardian'', 25 January 2010.

Grayling, A.C. ''Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction''. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hacker, P.M.S.. ''Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein''. Clarendon Press, 1986.

Hacker, P.M.S. "Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann", in Ted Honderich (ed.). ''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy''. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Hacker, P.M.S. ''Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy''. Blackwell, 1996.

Hacker, P.M.S. ''Wittgenstein: Mind and Will''. Blackwell, 1996.

Jormakka, Kari. "The Fifth Wittgenstein", ''Datutop'' 24, 2004, a discussion of the connection between Wittgenstein's architecture and his philosophy.

Levy, Paul. ''Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles''. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979.

McGuinness, Brian. ''Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951''. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

Padilla Gálvez, J., ''Wittgenstein, from a New Point of View''. Wittgenstein-Studien. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 2003. ISBN: 3-631-50623-6.

Padilla Gálvez, J., ''Philosophical Anthropology. Wittgenstein’s Perspectives''. Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos Verlag, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-86838-0687-5.

Monk, Ray. ''How To Read Wittgenstein''. Norton, 2005.

Pears, David F. "A Special Supplement: The Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy", ''The New York Review of Books'', 10 July 1969.

Pears, David F. ''The False Prison, A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy'', Volumes 1 and 2. Oxford University Press, 1987 and 1988.

Richter, Duncan J. "Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889—1951)", ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', 30 August 2004, accessed 16 September 2010.

Scheman, Naomi and O'Connor, Peg (eds.). ''Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein''. Penn State Press, 2002.

;Works referencing Wittgenstein

Doctorow, E.L. ''City of God''. Plume, 2001, depicts an imaginary rivalry between Wittgenstein and Einstein.

Doxiadis, Apostolos and Papadimitriou, Christos. ''Logicomix''. Bloomsbury, 2009.

Duffy, Bruce. ''The World as I Found It''. Ticknor & Fields, 1987, a recreation of Wittgenstein's life.

Jarman, Derek. ''Wittgenstein'', a biopic of Wittgenstein with a script by Terry Eagleton, British Film Institute, 1993.

Kerr, Philip. ''A Philosophical Investigation'', Chatto & Windus, 1992, a dystopian thriller set in 2012.

Markson, David. ''Wittgenstein's Mistress''. Dalkey Archive Press, 1988, an experimental novel, a first-person account of what it would be like to live in the world of the ''Tractatus''.

Wallace, David Foster. ''The Broom of the System''. Penguin Books, 1987, a novel.

Category:20th-century philosophers Category:1889 births Category:1951 deaths Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Category:Austrian Catholics Category:Austrian expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:Austrian expatriates in the United States Category:Austrian people of Jewish descent Category:British people of Jewish descent Category:Austrian philosophers Category:Austrian refugees Category:Austrian people of German descent Category:Austro-Hungarian Jews Category:Austro-Hungarian military personnel of World War I Category:British philosophers Category:Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club Category:Cancer deaths in England Category:Deaths from prostate cancer Category:Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge Category:German Catholics Category:German-language philosophers Category:Jewish philosophers Category:Jews who emigrated to the United Kingdom to escape Nazism Category:LGBT writers from Austria Category:Logicians Category:Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom Category:Ontologists Category:People from Vienna Category:People associated with the University of Manchester Category:Philosophers of language Category:Philosophers of mathematics Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Recipients of the Military Merit Medal (Austria-Hungary) Category:Berlin Institute of Technology alumni * Wittgenstein, Ludwig Category:World War I prisoners of war held by Italy

rue:Людвіґ Вітґенштейн

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B. Alan Wallace (born 1950) is an American author, translator, teacher, researcher, interpreter, and Buddhist practitioner interested in the intersections of consciousness studies and scientific disciplines such as psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and physics. He endeavors to chart relationships and commonalities between Eastern and Western scientific, philosophical, and contemplative modes of inquiry.

Since 1976, Wallace has taught Buddhism, philosophy, and meditation in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Australia. Wallace grew up in America and Switzerland but left college after three years to study Buddhism in India. He has served as interpreter for many Buddhist contemplatives and scholars, including the Dalai Lama. He is a prolific author of numerous books and essays and has translated dozens of Sanskrit and Tibetan texts into English. Wallace has a bachelor's degree in physics and philosophy of science from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Stanford. He also founded and is President of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. In 2010 Wallace became the Director and Chairman of the Phuket International Academy Thanyapura Mind Centre, which provides a blend of contemporary psychology and neuroscience alongside ancient Asian contemplative practices. He is currently leading two 8-week, residential, intensive meditation retreats there each year, which are open to all who are interested in developing exceptional mental balance and well-being. In addition, together with Paul Ekman he is leading a 6-week course to train instructors in "Cultivating Emotional Balance," a 42-hour program developed by Dr. Wallace and Dr. Ekman, which was scientifically studied at the University of California, San Francisco. All these retreats and courses are organized in collaboration with the Santa Barbara Institute. His life's work focuses on a deep engagement between Buddhist philosophical and contemplative inquiry and modern science and philosophy, with a special emphasis on exploring the nature and potentials of the mind in a radically empirical manner, as free as possible from the dogmas of religion and materialism.

Biography

Alan Wallace was born in Pasadena, California, in 1950, the son of Protestant theologian David H. Wallace, and was raised in the United States, Scotland, and Switzerland. In 1968, he began his undergraduate education at the University of California, San Diego, with an emphasis on biology and philosophy. He spent his third year abroad at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he shifted the direction of his studies to Tibetan culture and language. Wishing to immerse himself more fully in the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, in 1971 he discontinued his university education and moved to Dharamsala, India, where he enrolled in classes at the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, which was established in that year under the auspices of the Dalai Lama. In 1973, as a newly ordained Buddhist monk, he enrolled in the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, where he trained until 1974. The following year he received full monastic ordination from the Dalai Lama, who then encouraged him to join the renowned Buddhist contemplative Geshe Rabten at the Tibet Institute in Switzerland. Two years later, he continued his training and also began teaching at the Center for Higher Tibetan Studies in Mt. Pelerin, Switzerland, still training under Geshe Rabten and many other Tibetan scholars and contemplatives. In 1979, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, he returned to India, where he began a series of solitary meditation retreats, first under the direct guidance of the Dalai Lama, and later in Sri Lanka and the United States. In 1984, he enrolled in Amherst College, where, as an Independent Scholar, he studied physics, the philosophy of science, and Sanskrit, completing his undergraduate degree summa cum laude and phi beta kappa in 1987 . His undergraduate honors thesis was published in two volumes, ''Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind'' and ''Transcendent Wisdom: A Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life''. In 1987, with the permission of the Dalai Lama, he formally returned his monastic vows, and two years later married Vesna A. Wallace, an accomplished Buddhist scholar in her own right. In that same year, he enrolled in the graduate program in religious studies at Stanford University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1995. During these years at Stanford, he also continued his studies of the philosophy of science and of the mind. His main research centered on integrating Buddhism with Western science and philosophy with the aim of achieving a more comprehensive understanding of consciousness. His dissertation was published under the title ''The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation'', and during this time he also wrote ''The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness''. In 1997, he joined the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught courses on Tibetan Buddhism, language, and culture, as well as the interface between science and religion. In 2001, he left his position at the university and devoted himself to a six-month solitary meditation retreat in the high desert of eastern California. In 2003, Alan established the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, a non-profit institution concerned with synthesizing scientific and contemplative inquiry into the nature and potentials of consciousness.

As a translator

B. Alan Wallace has served as translator for dozens of Tibetan lamas over the last thirty years in India, Europe, and North America. In 1979, he served as the Dalai Lama's interpreter during his first teaching tour in the West, during which he lectured in Switzerland and Greece before making his way to the United States for his first visit there. Since the founding of the Mind and Life Institute in 1987, he has helped to organize its conferences, for which he, together with Dr. Thupten Jinpa, has served as interpreter for the Dalai Lama and the participating scientists and philosophers. From 1992 to 1997, he served as the interpreter and translator for Gyatrul Rinpoche, a senior Lama of the Nyingma Order of Tibetan Buddhism.

Writings

Published Books

''Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity. ''Embracing Mind: The Common Ground of Science and Spirituality'', co-authored with Brian Hodel. ''Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness''. ''Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge''. ''Genuine Happiness: Meditation as the Path to Fulfillment''. ''Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground'' (Ed.). ''Buddhism with an Attitude: The Tibetan Seven-Point Mind-Training''. ''The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness''. ''Boundless Heart: The Four Immeasurables''. ''The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Tibetan Buddhist Meditation''. ''Tibetan Buddhism From the Ground Up''. ''A Passage from Solitude: A Modern Commentary on Tibetan Buddhist Mind Training''. ''Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind''.

Published Translations

''The Vajra Essence: From the Matrix of Primordial Consciousness and Pure Appearances: A Tantra on the Self-arisen Nature of Existence'' by Düdjom Lingpa (Mirror of Wisdom Publications, 2004).

''Healing from the Source: The Science and Lore of Tibetan Medicine'' by Dr. Yeshi Dhonden (2000).

''Naked Awareness: Practical Teachings on the Union of Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen'' by Karma Chagmé, with commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche (Snow Lion Publications, 2000).

''Transcending Time: The Kālacakra Six-Session Guruyoga'' by Gen Lamrimpa (Wisdom Publications, 1999).

''Realizing Emptiness: The Madhyamaka Cultivation of Insight'' by Gen Lamrimpa (Snow Lion Publications, 1999).

''A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on the Union of Mahāmudrā and Atiyoga'' by Karma Chagmé, with commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche (Snow Lion Publications, 1998).

''Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos'' by Padmasambhava, with commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche (Wisdom Publications, 1998).

''A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life: A translation from the Sanskrit and Tibetan of Ṥāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra'' by Ṥāntideva, co-translated with Vesna A. Wallace (Snow Lion Publications, 1997).

''Ancient Wisdom: Nyingma Teachings of Dream Yoga, Meditation and Transformation'', by Gyatrul Rinpoche. Co-translated with Sangye Khandro (Snow Lion Publications, 1993).

''Shamatha Meditation: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on Cultivating Meditative Quiescence'' by Gen Lamrimpa (Snow Lion Publications, 1992).

''Transcendent Wisdom: A Commentary on the Ninth Chapter of Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life'' by the Dalai Lama (Snow Lion Publications, 1988).

''The Kalachakra Tantra'' by Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey (Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1986).

''The Life and Teachings of Geshé Rabten'' by Geshé Rabten (George Allen & Unwin, 1980).

''Waterdrop from the Glorious Sea: A History of the Sakya Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism'' by Sherab Gyaltsen Amipa (Tibet Institute, 1976).

''The Ambrosia Heart Tantra: A Classic Treatise on Tibetan Medicine'', Annotated by Dr. Yeshi Dhonden (Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, 1976).

Essays

B. Alan Wallace has written dozens of published essays in the fields of philosophy, psychology, physics, and Buddhism. Electronic copies of his essays are available from his website.

Selected Essays:

"Vacuum States of Consciousness: A Tibetan Buddhist View." In ''Buddhist Thought and Applied Psychology: Transcending the Boundaries''. D.K. Nauriyal, ed. London: Routledge-Curzon, 2006, pp. 112–121.

"Awakening to the Dream" ''Tricycle'', Winter 2006, pp. 52–57.

"Religion and Reason: Letter to a Christian Nation Reviewed." ''Shambhala Sun'', November 2006, pp. 99–100.

"Mental Balance and Well-Being: Building Bridges Between Buddhism and Western Psychology." ''American Psychologist'', October 2006.

"Immaterial Evidence." ''Tricycle'', Spring 2006. pp. 84–86.

"Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being." Co-author with Paul Ekman, Richard Davidson, and Matthieu Ricard. ''Current Directions in Psychology'', 2005, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 59–63.

"The Intersubjective Worlds of Science and Religion." ''Science, Religion, and the Human Experience''. James Proctor, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

"A Science of Consciousness: Buddhism (1), the Modern West (0) ''The Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies'', 2003.

"The Spectrum of Buddhist Practice in the West." ''Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia'', Charles Prebish & Martin Baumann (eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

"Tibetan Buddhism in the West: Is It Working?" ''Tricycle: The Buddhist Review'', Summer 2001, pp. 54–63.

"Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism." ''Journal of Consciousness Studies'', 8, No. 5-7, 2001, pp. 209–30.

"Afterword: Buddhist Reflections," concluding essay for ''Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brainscience and Buddhism''. With Zara Houshmand and Robert Livingston. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1999.

"The Dialectic Between Religious Belief and Contemplative Knowledge in Tibetan Buddhism." ''Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections of Contemporary Buddhist Scholars'', John Makransky & Roger Jackson, eds., pp. 203–214. London: Curzon Press. 1999.

"The Buddhist Tradition of Samatha: Methods for Refining and Examining Consciousness." ''Journal of Consciousness Studies'', 6, No. 2-3, 1999. pp. 175–187.

Research

The Shamatha Project (2007)

Recent studies of the effects of meditation practices on stress management and emotional stability and of meditation as a therapeutic agent have produced exciting results. But the studies conducted to date have been short-term and have generally used non-intensive interventions. The Shamatha Project includes a team of talented neuroscientists and psychologists in a longer-term study, with state-of-the-art methods, to examine the effects of intensive meditation training on attention, cognitive performance, emotion regulation, and health. This effort, the Shamatha Project, garnered the endorsement of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and initial funding from three private foundations, The Fetzer Institute, the Hershey Family Foundation, and the Yoga Research and Education Foundation. The training methods, taught by Dr. Alan Wallace, included deep, intensive meditation training that fosters attentional vividness and stability as well as compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The expected benefits included greater attentional control and increased ability to regulate emotions and apply prosocial values and motives.

More information on the Shamatha Project

Cultivating Emotional Balance

The Cultivating Emotional Balance research project arose from a dialogue between biobehavioral scientists studying emotion and the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks and scholars. This meeting, which took place in March 2000, in Dharamsala, India, was one in a series sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute to foster an interchange between the Buddhist tradition and Western science.

More information on CEB

The Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation Study (CALM)

Increasing evidence suggests that meditation improves both emotional and physical well-being. However, much remains to be understood about how meditation might confer these health benefits. To address key unanswered questions within the field of meditation research, investigators from the Mind-Body Program and Emory-Tibet Partnership at Emory University are collaborating with the Santa Barbara Institute to conduct the Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation (CALM) Study. The CALM Study will extend recent findings that training in compassion meditation reduces the types of deleterious physical and emotional responses to psychological stress that have been associated with an array of modern illnesses, including depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and dementia.

More information on CALM

Other Projects

Consultant for The Mechanisms of Meditation Project, with Charles Raison as the Principal Investigator, co-sponsored by Emory University and the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, 2007 – present.

Consultant for the research project Cultivating Emotional Balance in the Classroom (CEBC), with Patricia Jennings as the Principal Investigator and Margaret Kemeny as Co-Principal Investigator, co-sponsored by San Francisco State University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, 2005 – present.

Consultant and meditation instructor for the Mindful Attention Training (MAT) for epilepsy, a research project to study the effectiveness of attentional training for reducing the frequency and intensity of epileptic seizures, directed by Dr. Jerome Pete Engel at the Reed Neurologic Research Center at UCLA, and Dr. Christoph Baumgartner at the Medical University of Vienna, 2005 - 2006.

Consultant for the Mindful Awareness Project (MAP), involving research to develop meditative training for the prevention and treatment of ADHD, directed by Dr. Susan Smalley and her colleagues at the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics at the UCLA School of Medicine, 2004–present.

Co-principal investigator and Contemplative Director for the “Shamatha Project,” a longitudinal, scientific study of the effects of 3 months of attentional training on attentional and emotional balance, in collaboration with a team of cognitive scientists at the University of California, Davis; co-sponsored by the Santa Barbara Institute and the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, the Department of Psychology, and the Imaging Research Center, 2003–present.

Consultant and trainer for the “Cultivating Emotional Balance” (CEB) project, co-sponsored by the University of California, San Francisco and the Santa Barbara Institute, 2003–present.

Consultant and interpreter for a research project on traditional Tibetan medical treatment for breast cancer, University of California at San Francisco and California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, 1995-8.

Researcher in the project “Training the Mind” to conduct psychological and neuroscientific studies of attention and compassion among advanced Tibetan contemplatives in northern India 1990-1992.

Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

In 2003, B. Alan Wallace founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies as a not-for-profit institution with the interest of furthering our understanding of the nature, origins, and role of consciousness. He proposes that the nature of consciousness can most deeply be studied from a first-person perspective, and not be limited to the third-person methodologies of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Optimally, the first-person methods of the contemplative traditions of the world, such as Buddhism, may be integrated with the objective methods of science to create a new discipline of "contemplative science." Influences on his thinking and research derive not only from Buddhism and contemporary physics and neuroscience, but also William James, the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher whom he often refers to as one of his "intellectual heroes."

See also

Lojong

Neurophenomenology

References

External links

Official website

Review of Wallace's ''Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge''

Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

'Towards the First Revolution in the Mind Sciences', a lecture at Google headquarters

Wallace interview on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe

Wallace interview on Skeptiko

Audio Interview Series on Buddhist Geeks

“Naturalizing the Mind Sciences,” presented as a keynote address for the conference “Mind & Reality: A Multidisciplinary Symposium on Consciousness,” hosted by the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University, Feb. 25-26, 2006.

Selected References & Sources

Snow Lion Publications Google Tech Talks Shambhala Mountain Center

Category:Amherst College alumni Category:Modern Buddhist writers Category:People from Pasadena, California Category:Buddhist translators Category:1950 births Category:Living people Category:Tibetan Buddhists from the United States

fr:B. Alan Wallace nl:Alan Wallace