Wittgenstein 1908 – 1912

1908-1911  MANCHESTER 

Wittgenstein moved to Manchester in May 1908, after three semesters studying mechanical engineering at the Technical High School Charlottenburg (1906-1908). As a rather informal research student at the university, he was involved in experiments and research on aeronautics until 1911.

I wrote to Frege putting forward some objections to his theories, and waited anxiously for a reply. To my great pleasure, Frege wrote and asked me to come and see him. When I arrived I saw a row of boys’ school caps and heard a noise of boys playing in the garden. Frege, I learned later, had had a sad married life – his children had died young, and then his wife; he had an adopted son, to whom I believe he was a kind and good father. 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. He once showed me an obituary of a colleague, who, it was said, never used a word without knowing what it meant; he expressed astonishment that a man should be praised for this! The last time I saw Frege, as we were waiting at the station for my train, I said to him “Don’t you ever find any difficulty in your theory that numbers are objects?! He replied “Sometimes I seem to see a difficulty – but then again I don’t see it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein in a personal communication to Peter Geach

Courtesy Brian McGuinness, Young Ludwig, 1988

1911-1912  CAMBRIDGE 

Bertrand Russell to Ludwig’s sister Hermine Wittgenstein

Bertrand Russell: Last Philosophical Testament