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Philosophy Then

Wittgenstein & The War

Peter Adamson says one good thing came out of WW1.

World War One has a lot to answer for, including World War Two – or at least that’s what I was taught in school. Paradoxically, given its transformative effects, I was also taught in school that World War One was pointless. Our image of that war is of literally entrenched soldiers perishing in droves as the battle lines refuse to budge. Yet at least one worthwhile thing did emerge from this tragic conflict: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was composed during the war while its author was serving in the Austrian army and then detained as a prisoner of war in Italy.

Wittgenstein was one of the many Europeans who greeted the outbreak of war with excitement as well as trepidation.

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