![]() ![]() Today, it is Wittgenstein’s later work that commands the most attention, but the “Tractatus”-a brief, dense book that, like Euclid’s treatise on geometry, takes the form of a series of numbered propositions-magnetized readers from the start with its radical ambition. It was while on leave in the summer of 1918 that Wittgenstein completed his “ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which was published in 1921. Captured just days before the Armistice, in November, 1918, he spent nine months as a prisoner of war in Italy before returning home to Vienna, an imperial capital suddenly stranded in a small, parochial new state. ![]() Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, served in the war as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. The defeat of the Central Powers in the First World War gave rise to one of these historic bursts of creative thinking. At moments of humiliation and confusion, when people need to rebuild their understanding of the world, they are willing to rethink assumptions that go unchallenged in normal times. Socrates served in the losing Athenian army in the Peloponnesian War Thomas Hobbes wrote “ Leviathan” while in exile in Paris after the defeat of the royalists in the English Civil War. ![]() ![]() Philosophy often flourishes in the aftermath of wars, especially lost wars. ![]()
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