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“... only to find himself caught up in a sort of Shavian house-party consisting of Leopold Bloom, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nikolai Bakhtin (the brother of Mikhail), and a trooper called Molloy, all of whom just happen to fetch up in a lonely Connemara cottage. What follows is often highly amusing, since Eagleton is (as one had suspected) pretty good at the ...”

“... scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and Schumpeter, had departed independently of this. They not only left behind a vacuum of creativity that has not been filled: they transferred their crafts and disciplines to the English-speaking world, where they flourish to this day. Their story ...”

“... of sand.’ Some philosophers, such as Crispin Wright, respond to this paradox in the spirit of Wittgenstein. They argue that (as Soames puts it) ‘the rules governing ordinary vague predicates simply do not allow for sharp and precise lines dividing objects to which the predicates apply from objects of any other sort.’ Others, such as Timothy ...”

“... and by Husserl. The very question, ‘How does thought hook on to the world?’ was undermined by Wittgenstein. Yet, by and large, these attacks on the epistemological model – and without question they represent much of the best philosophy done in the last hundred years – have had zero effect on European culture, or on the thinking of scientists and ...”

“... accented. In some portraits – those of Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann and Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, for example (the first of these and a study for the second are in the exhibition Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life, until 31 August) – a hint of the imagined type may be preserved, but the faces in his portraits are more usually ...”

“... while keeping faith with the dead. Before Adorno began to write, another part-Jewish thinker, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a man who once observed that his thought was Jewish all the way through, had questioned the limits of representation in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, faithful among other things to the traditional Judaic ban on graven ...”

“... quickly. It is also, of course, a remark about the limits of what we can use language to do, but Wittgenstein is unusual as a philosopher because he so often writes about the difficulties a child has growing up in a family. His wish to clarify the world as he finds it, his stress on ‘perspicuous representations’ and ‘just that understanding which ...”

“... This is the first half of a survey of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The division into two quite slim volumes does not mean that Professor Pears accepts a received view: that the man had two philosophies. The split is practical. University courses are commonly about either Philosophical Investigations or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1953 and 1921 respectively ...”

“... if it’s easier to be good if you don’t care whether you’re wearing knickers or mind, as Wittgenstein didn’t, living on porridge; goodness more accessible if you’re what my mother used to call ‘a sluppers’.Nobody explains (or seems to think an explanation required) how this unworldly woman managed to be made a dame by Mrs Thatcher and was ...”

“... between Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Arnold Schoenberg, Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They felt an imperative to penetrate through a veil of appearance to a core of truth, to understand and explain, to assimilate aesthetics and ethics and to elaborate a code of personal integrity. Hence Mahler’s campaign against ...”

“... distinct items in which ‘Sokal Affair’ was a key phrase. For comparison, it found 7767 for Ludwig Wittgenstein and 11,334 for Quantum Mechanics, the science whose abuse furnished Sokal’s illustrations. I find the whole event rather embarrassing. Do I want to live in a scholarly community where so many bad arguments are taken seriously? Many ...”

“... or refinement or loosening of those workings. ‘How does language hook on to the world?’ Wittgenstein asked early in his career. One answer is that it never does, quite. Another would be that it does it in all kinds of ways, and that particular contexts determine how the act of hooking works, so that at this moment you know, for various contingent ...”

“... a first law’. For an unproblematic description of this law is neither easy nor straightforward. Ludwig Boltzmann, the greatest physicist of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spent most of his career trying to define its meaning and clarify its basis. Now Carlo Cercignani, a mathematical physicist working in Milan, tries to explain the importance of Boltzmann’s ...”

“... In the spring of 1914 Wittgenstein gave a third of the annual income from his inheritance – 100,000 Austrian crowns – to Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the journal Der Brenner, to be shared out between worthy poets. When Ficker chose Georg Trakl as one beneficiary, Wittgenstein said that he didn’t understand Trakl’s poems, but felt they bore the stamp of ‘genius ...”

“... women, all of them married to other men: Countess Marie d’Agoult, Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, and a spy named Agnès Street-Klindworth. The Selected Letters alone indicate more than that. One letter, to Marie, reads: ‘I want to tell you, too, of a kind of passion to which I abandoned myself for 48 hours. Don’t be jealous. It concerns the ...”