Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Reading Wittgenstein (on) Reading: An Introduction
- 1 Eggshells or Nourishing Yolk? A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Weiningerian
- 2 Weininger and the Two Wittgensteins
- 3 Sex and Solipsism: Weininger's On Last Things
- 4 Wittgenstein and Weininger: Time, Life, World
- 5 Uncanny Differences: Wittgenstein and Weininger as Doppelgänger
- 6 Weininger and Wittgenstein on “Animal Psychology”
- References
Reading Wittgenstein (on) Reading: An Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Reading Wittgenstein (on) Reading: An Introduction
- 1 Eggshells or Nourishing Yolk? A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Weiningerian
- 2 Weininger and the Two Wittgensteins
- 3 Sex and Solipsism: Weininger's On Last Things
- 4 Wittgenstein and Weininger: Time, Life, World
- 5 Uncanny Differences: Wittgenstein and Weininger as Doppelgänger
- 6 Weininger and Wittgenstein on “Animal Psychology”
- References
Summary
Wittgenstein's influences
In 1931, Ludwig Wittgenstein included Otto Weininger on a list he made of ten writers who had influenced him. He wrote:
I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann Hertz Schopenhauer Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me.
The list appears to be arranged according to the chronological order in which they influenced Wittgenstein. One sign of this is the odd punctuation of the list, which is due to the fact that Wittgenstein first wrote just four names – “Frege, Russell, Spengler, Sraffa” – and added the other names, carefully arranged in order, above the line. The first three names are authors Wittgenstein read as a teenager; Frege and Russell first had an impact on him when he was in his early twenties. While Wittgenstein would certainly have known of Kraus and Weininger long before 1914, for both were famous and controversial in fin-de-siècle Vienna, their position on the list, and the fact that Kraus, Loos and Weininger all had an influence on the Tractatus, which was composed during the First World War, suggests that their influence should be dated to the war years, or immediately before.
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- Wittgenstein Reads Weininger , pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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