PERSON
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian-British philosopher (1889–1951) whose adversarial encounter with Popper at Cambridge in 1946 — the "poker incident" — has become the symbolic clash between two conceptions of philosophy's purpose.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953, posthumous). His relationship with Popper was marked by ideological opposition and, in one famous 1946 encounter at Cambridge, personal hostility. Popper had been invited to deliver a paper at the Cambridge Moral Science Club. Wittgenstein, who chaired the meeting, interrupted repeatedly. At one point, during a dispute over the existence of genuine philosophical problems versus mere linguistic puzzles, Wittgenstein picked up a fireplace poker — what he was doing with it became the subject of decades of dispute among eyewitnesses. Wittgenstein left the meeting in anger. The incident has become symbolic of the clash between Popper's view that philosophy addresses real problems and Wittgenstein's view that philosophy dissolves pseudo-problems through linguistic analysis.
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The philosophical dispute underneath the personal conflict was substantive. Wittgenstein, particularly in his later work, held that most philosophical problems arise from linguistic confusion and