000 01419nam a2200193 4500
010 _a2002276301
020 _a9780060936648
024 _a48988526
050 _aB3376.W564
082 _a192
100 1 _aDavid Edmonds
245 1 _aWittgenstein's Poker
260 _bHarper Perennial
300 _a352 pages
520 _aOn October 25, 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, the great twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face to face for the first and only time. The meeting -- which lasted ten minutes -- did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend, but precisely what happened during that brief confrontation remained for decades the subject of intense disagreement.An engaging mix of philosophy, history, biography, and literary detection, Wittgenstein's Poker explores, through the Popper/Wittgenstein confrontation, the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. It evokes the tumult of fin-de-sičle Vienna, Wittgentein's and Popper's birthplace; the tragedy of the Nazi takeover of Austria; and postwar Cambridge University, with its eccentric set of philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell. At the center of the story stand the two giants of philosophy themselves -- proud, irascible, larger than life -- and spoiling for a fight.
650 _aPhilosophy
700 1 _aJohn Eidinow
999 _c4698
_d4698