## Wittgenstein Vs Turing: Logic Contradictions

### Posted by Ali Reda | Posted in | Posted on 10/26/2013

Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics.

Wittgenstein: Think of the case of the Liar: It is very queer in a way that this should have puzzled anyone — much more extraordinary than you might think... Because the thing works like this: if a man says 'I am lying' we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you are black in the face. Why not? It doesn't matter. ...it is just a useless language-game, and why should anyone be excited?
Turing: What puzzles one is that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong. But in this case one cannot find anything done wrong.
Wittgenstein: Yes — and more: nothing has been done wrong, ... where will the harm come?
Turing: The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort…. You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know that there are no hidden contradictions in it.
Wittgenstein: There seems to me an enormous mistake there. ... Suppose I convince [someone] of the paradox of the Liar, and he says, 'I lie, therefore I do not lie, therefore I lie and I do not lie, therefore we have a contradiction, therefore 2x2 = 369.' Well, we should not call this 'multiplication,' that is all...
Turing: Although you do not know that the bridge will fall if there are no contradictions, yet it is almost certain that if there are contradictions it will go wrong somewhere.
Wittgenstein: But nothing has ever gone wrong that way yet...

Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false).

When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse.

Therefore classical logic is not always applicable to real-world situations, no matter how well the parts we've used so far seem to have worked. And we have no theory of when it will be applicable and when it will fail (at least, we didn't in Wittgenstein's time; some might argue that relevance logics give us such a theory now).

## Heidegger

### Posted by Ali Reda | Posted in | Posted on 10/25/2013

"Dasein," the being who understands Being. Existence means that Dasein is potentiality-for-being; it projects its being upon various possibilities. Existence represents thus the phenomenon of the future. Then, as thrownness, Dasein always finds itself already in a certain spiritual and material, historically conditioned environment; in short, in the world, in which the space of possibilities is always somehow limited. This represents the phenomenon of the past as having-been. Finally, as fallenness, Dasein in the world exists in the midst of beings which are both Dasein and not Dasein. This represents the primordial phenomenon of the present. Accordingly, Dasein is not temporal for the mere reason that it exists “in time,” but because its very being is rooted in temporality: the original unity of the future, the past and the present which constitutes authentic temporality.

According to Heidegger, as this sense of being precedes any notions of how or in what manner any particular being or beings exist, it is pre-conceptual, non-propositional, and hence pre-scientific.Thus, in Heidegger's view, fundamental ontology would be an explanation of the understanding preceding any other way of knowing, such as the use of logic, theory, specific ontology or act of reflective thought. Being is to be grasped by means of the phenomenological method. One must direct oneself toward a Dasein  but in such a way that its being is thereby brought out.

Metaphysics provides an answer to the question of the being of beings for contemporary men and women, but skillfully removes from their lives the problem of their own existence. Metaphysics cannot be rejected, canceled or denied, but it can be overcome by demonstrating its forgetfulness of being.

Heidegger talks about "enframing". You place a frame around something and it brings qualities of understanding, revealing aspects of our humanity or aspects of our universe. At one time, when we worked with our hands, technology was a means of enframing through which we discovered things about ourselves. The early making of technological devices to explore scientific reality was a driving force in scientific research.

But enframing can work the other way as well, concealing things from our attention. For example, a friendly chat in the bar is turned into networking. Heidegger claims that what is “horrifying” is not any of technology’s particular harmful effects but “what transposes ... all that is out of its previous essence” — that is to say, what is dangerous is that technology displaces beings from what they originally were, hindering our ability to experience them truly. Modern technology has separated us from direct experience of the world. Heidegger’s alternatives provide ways to clarify the irreducibility of our experience to what we can capture technologically, or through natural science.

Heidegger observes that because of technology, “all distances in time and space are shrinking” and “yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.”

Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance.

## Wittgenstein: A Life

### Posted by Ali Reda | Posted in | Posted on 10/24/2013

“You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself”

### Biography

Wittgenstein was born in 1889 into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father was a major figure in the Austrian iron and steel industry, Ludwig grew up in an environment in which the intellectual and artistic currents of the cultural life of Vienna were dominant. Ludwig, who was the youngest of the family. The children were baptized as Catholics, and raised in an exceptionally intense environment. The family was at the center of Vienna's cultural life; Bruno Walter described the life at the Wittgensteins' palace as an "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture". Music was a part of the daily life of the home.

Psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald argues that Karl (Father) was a harsh perfectionist who lacked empathy, and that Wittgenstein's mother was anxious and insecure, unable to stand up to her husband. Three of the five brothers would later commit suicide.

It was while he was at the Realschule that he decided he had lost his faith in God. He discussed it with Gretl, his other sister, who directed him to Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. As a teenager, Wittgenstein adopted Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism. However, after his study of the philosophy of mathematics, he abandoned epistemological idealism for Gottlob Frege's conceptual realism. In later years, Wittgenstein was highly dismissive of Schopenhauer, describing him as an ultimately "shallow" thinker: "Schopenhauer has quite a crude mind... where real depth starts, his comes to an end"

While a student at the Realschule, Wittgenstein was influenced by Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger's 1903 book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Weininger (1880–1903), who was both Jewish and homosexual, argued that the concepts male and female exist only as Platonic forms, and that Jews tend to embody the platonic femininity. Whereas men are basically rational, women operate only at the level of their emotions and sexual organs. Jews, Weininger argued, are similar, saturated with femininity, with no sense of right and wrong, and no soul. 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. Weininger committed suicide, shooting himself in 1903, shortly after publishing the book. Many years later, as a professor at Cambridge, Wittgenstein distributed copies of Weininger's book to his bemused academic colleagues. He said that Weininger's arguments were wrong, but that it was the way in which they were wrong that was interesting.

Ludwig at first prepared himself for a career in engineering. He enrolled in and did research at the Engineering Laboratory of the University of Manchester, where he remained until the winter term of 1911. Wittgenstein came upon Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics, published in 1903. He read this with great interest. Through the study of this book he learned of Frege's new logic'. Wittgenstein became so absorbed in these studies that he decided to give up aeronautical engineering as a career. In the summer of 1911 he visited Frege at the University of Jena to show him some philosophy of mathematics and logic he had written, and to ask whether it was worth pursuing. 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.
On Frege's suggestion he went to Cambridge to study with Russell, so on 18 October 1911 Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in Trinity College. Russell was having tea with C. K. Ogden, he was soon not only attending Russell's lectures, but dominating them. The lectures were poorly attended. 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 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 Russell 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."
Russell, speaking to Wittgenstein's sister, Hermine, 1912:
We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.
And in his Autobiography, He wrote:
He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled except by G. E. Moore. I remember taking him once to a meeting of the Aristotelian Society, at which there were various fools whom I treated politely. When we came away he raged and stormed against my moral degradation in not telling these men what fools they were.
At the end of his first term at Trinity, he came to me and said: Do you think I am an absolute idiot?' I said: Why do you want to know?' He replied: 'Because if I am I shall become an aeronaut, but if I am not I shall become a philosopher.' I said to him: My dear fellow, I don't know whether you are an absolute idiot or not, but if you will write me an essay during the vacation upon any philosophical topic that interests you, I will read it and tell you.' He did so, and brought it to me at the beginning of the next term. As soon as I read the first sentence, I became persuaded that he was a man of genius, and assured him that he should on no account become an aeronaut.
He used to come to see me every evening at midnight, and pace up and down the room like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence. Once I said to him: 'Are you thinking about logic, or about your sins?' 'Both', he replied, and continued his pacing. I did not like to suggest it was time for bed, for it seemed probable both to him and to me that on leaving me he would commit suicide.
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."
Wittgenstein remained for the three terms of 1912 and for the first two terms of 1913. Pinsent wrote in May 1912 that Wittgenstein had just begun to study the history of philosophy:
"He expresses the most naive surprise that all the philosophers he once worshipped in ignorance are after all stupid and dishonest and make disgusting mistakes!"
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 apparently started waving a hot poker, 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 told Wittgenstein he had misunderstood and Wittgenstein left.

In the autumn of 1913 Wittgenstein went to Norway with a young mathematician friend from Cambridge, David Pinsent. Pinsent's diaries provide valuable insights into Wittgenstein's personality - sensitive, nervous and attuned to the tiniest slight or change in mood from Pinsent. Pinsent was later killed in World War I, and the Tractatus is dedicated to him. In a letter to Russell in 1913:
“My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn’t live much longer.”
deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person.
Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time - but how can I be a logician before I'm a human being? Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!
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. He used to say:
'Then my mind was on fire!'
While in Norway, Wittgenstein learned Norwegian to converse with the local villagers, and Danish to read the works of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He remained there until the outbreak of the war in 1914.

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."
Wittgenstein volunteered for military service in the Austrian army and saw active service at the front, yet managed to find time during this period to do some writing. 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 "His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism", which "won the total admiration of the troops." In January 1917, he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won several more medals for bravery including the Silver Medal for Valour, First Class. In 1918, he was promoted to lieutenant and sent to the Italian front as part of an artillery regiment.

In 1916 Wittgenstein read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov so often that he knew whole passages of it by heart, particularly the speeches of the elder Zossima, who represented for him a powerful Christian ideal, a holy man "who could see directly into the souls of other people".  Russell said he returned from the war a changed man, one with a deeply mystical and ascetic attitude. A series of events around this time left him deeply upset. On 13 August, his uncle Paul died. On 25 October, he learned that Jahoda 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.

He carried the manuscript of his work in his rucksack, and it was with him when he was captured at the end of the war, was made a prisoner, and confined at Monte Cassino in November 1918. He subsequently spent nine months in an Italian prisoner of war camp. 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 brother Paul. In a letter to Russell:
The best for me, perhaps, would be if I could lie down one evening and not wake up again.
He decided to do two things: to enroll in teacher training college as an elementary school teacher, and to get rid of his fortune.

Dear Russell,
[Cassino, Provincia Caserta, Italy]
13.3.19
Thanks so much for your postcards dated 2°' and 3rd of March. I've had a very bad time, not knowing whether you were dead or alive! I can't write on Logic as I'm not allowed to write more than two post] c[ard]s a week (15 lines each). This letter is an exception, it's posted by an Austrian medical student who goes home tomorrow. I've written a book called "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" containing my work of the last six years. I believe I've solved our problems finally. This may sound arrogant but I can't help believing it. I finished the book in August 1918 and two months after was made Prigioniere. I've got the manuscript here with me. I wish I could copy it out for you; but its pretty long and I would have no safe way of sending it to you. In fact you would not understand it without a previous explanation as it's written in quite short remarks. (this of course means that nobody will understand it; although I believe, it's all as clear as crystal. But it upsets all our theory of truth, of classes, of numbers and all the rest.) I will publish it as soon as I get home. Now I'm afraid this won't be "before long". And consequently it will be a long time yet till we can meet. I can hardly imagine seeing you again!
It will be too much! I suppose it would be impossible for you to come and see me here? or perhaps you think it's colossal cheek of me even to think of such a thing. But if you were on the other end of the world and I could come to you I would do it.
Please write to me how you are, remember me to Dr. Whitehead. Is old Johnson still alive? Think of me often!
Ever yours
Ludwig Wittgenstein

I got a letter from him written from Monte Cassino, saying that a few days after the Armistice, he had been taken prisoner by the Italians, but fortunately with his manuscript. It appears he had written a book in the trenches, and wished me to read it. He was the kind of man who would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. ... It was the book which was subsequently published under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. ~ Bertrand Russell in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1968) Ch. 9 : Russia, p. 330
The story of his repeated frustrations in trying to get his manuscript published at the end of the war marks one among the many unhappy chapters in his life. Wittgenstein desperately and repeatedly sought a publisher for his book and was turned down by five publishers! It narrowly missed not being published at all. 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. It finally appeared in 1922 in English. But it was not understood at all by Frege, and fundamentally misunderstood by Russell. In a letter written to Russell from the prison camp to which Wittgenstein was confined at the end of the World War I, there occurs the following passage:
Now I'm afraid you haven't really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical propositions is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositionls i.e. by language (and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what can not be expressed by propositions, but only shown; which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy. I also sent my M.S. to Frege. He wrote me a week ago and I gather that he doesn't understand a word of it all. So my only hope is to see you soon and explain all to you, for it is VERY hard not to be understood by a single soul!
After his military service during the First World War, he decided to become an elementary school teacher. He attended teacher training college in the Kundmanngasse in Vienna in September 1919, and in 1920 was given his first job as a teacher in Trattenbach, a village of just a few hundred inhabitants about 90 km southwest of Vienna in Lower Austria. It appears that he did not have a high opinion of the villagers. Writing to Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein said:
"I am still at exile, 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".
A year later, He wrote to Russell again saying:
"I am now in another hole, though I have to say, it is no better than the old one. Living with human beings is hard!"
There was one boy in particular, Karl Gruber, from an impoverished family with six children, whom Wittgenstein wanted to adopt. The two studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics together from four to seven in the evening, then dined in Wittgenstein's room. He proposed the adoption arrangement to Karl's parents, offering to send the boy to the city and finance his education. The boys' mother agreed, but the father said no and called Wittgenstein "ein verrückter Kerl" ("a crazy fellow").

Wittgenstein was reportedly seen as a tyrant by the slower students, boxing ears and pulling hair. Wittgenstein was a very nervous teacher. He would break out in a sweat, rub his chin a lot, pull his hair, and bite into a crumpled handkerchief. A student from Cambridge, Frank P. Ramsey, arrived in Austria to visit him on 17 September 1923 to discuss a review of the Tractatus he had agreed to write for Mind. Ramsey told John Maynard Keynes back in Cambridge that Wittgenstein was refusing all financial help from his family, and was even returning Christmas presents they sent him, because he did not want to have any money he had not earned himself.

The Tractatus was now the subject of much debate amongst philosophers, and Wittgenstein was a figure of increasing international fame. In particular, a discussion group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians, known as the Vienna Circle, had built up largely as a result of the inspiration they had been given by reading the Tractatus. From 1926, with the members of the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein would take part in many discussions. However, during these discussions, it soon became evident that Wittgenstein held a different attitude towards philosophy than the members of the Circle whom his work had inspired. For example, during meetings of the Vienna Circle, he would express his disagreement with the group's misreading of his work by turning his back to them and reading poetry aloud.

Rudolf Carnap said about him at that time:
"His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation"
Ten years later, Wittgenstein was living in Norway, and went through a period of wanting to make confessions to his friends about various issues, one of which was his use of violence against the children in Austria. One of the friends he confessed to, Fania Pascal, recalled the confession as:
"During the short period when he was teaching at a village school in Austria, he hit a little girl in his class and hurt her (my memory is, without details, of a physically violent act). When she ran to the headmaster to complain, Wittgenstein denied that he had done it."
In the same year that he made this confession to friends, he also travelled to Otterthal and appeared without warning at the homes of the children he had hurt. He visited at least four of them, asking for their forgiveness. In 1937 he wrote in a notebook:
Last year with God's help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure. If I do not correct this, I shall again drift entirely into those waters through which I was moving then.
In 1926, Wittgenstein was again working as a gardener for a number of months, this time at the monastery of Hütteldorf, where he had also enquired about becoming a monk. His sister, Margaret, invited him to help with the design of her new townhouse in Vienna's Kundmanngasse. Wittgenstein, his friend Paul Engelmann, and a team of architects developed a spare modernist house. In particular, Wittgenstein focused on the windows, doors, and radiators, demanding that every detail be exactly as he specified. When the house was nearly finished Wittgenstein had an entire ceiling raised 30mm so that the room had the exact proportions he wanted.

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.

In the Cambridge years, the philosopher Karl Britton said:
Wittgenstein spoke without notes but knew very well what he wanted to discuss and what he wanted to "put across," though sometimes he seemed to change his mind on some point while he was speaking . . . . But the most characteristic of all his attitudes was a very quiet, very intense stare-suddenly adopted and leading to a slow deliberate utterance of some new point. Very often he got thoroughly "stuck": appealed in vain to his hearers to help him out: he would walk about in despair murmuring: "I'm a fool, I'm a fool." And such was the difficulty of the topics he discussed, that all this struggle did not seem to us to be in the least excessive.
After the Anschluss, his brother Paul left almost immediately for England, and later the US. The Nazis discovered his relationship with Hilde Schania, a brewer's daughter with whom he had had two children but whom he 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. 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.

From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway,where he worked on the Philosophical Investigations. After G. E. Moore resigned the chair in philosophy in 1939, Wittgenstein was elected, and acquired British citizenship soon afterwards. He grew angry when any of his students wanted to become professional philosophers. 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. He resigned the professorship at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing, and in 1947 and 1948 travelled to Ireland where he began the manuscript volume MS 137, then he went to USA. He returned to London, where he was diagnosed with an inoperable prostate cancer, which had spread to his bone marrow.
"I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that." (1949)
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. He wrote:
"Great loss for me and all of us, greater than I would have thought."
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 did not want to die in a hospital, so they said he could spend his last days in their home instead. Joan at first was afraid of Wittgenstein, but they soon became good friends.

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 Norman 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. 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. 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"
Philosophical Investigations was published in two parts in 1953. Most of Part I was ready for printing in 1946, but Wittgenstein withdrew the manuscript from his publisher. The shorter Part II was added by his editors, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees.

Bertrand Russell in My Philosophical Development, Wrote of his later philosophy:
The later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. I realize, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement

## Works

### Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

http://techrig.blogspot.com/2013/10/tractatus-logico-philosophicus.html

### Blue and Brown Books

http://techrig.blogspot.com/2013/10/blue-and-brown-books.html

#### On Certainty

http://techrig.blogspot.com/2013/10/on-certainty.html

Philosophical Investigations
For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
Culture and Value
“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”
Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.
Ambition is the death of thought.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.
Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

Notebooks 1914-1916
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.
What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.
What do I know about God and the purpose of life?I know that this world exists.That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.That life is the world.That my will penetrates the world.That my will is good or evil.Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
Comparing Quotes
"Hell is other people" ~ No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre
"Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person" ~ Tennessee Williams
"(On Satre) Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself" ~ Wittgenstein