Talk:Ludwig Wittgenstein

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[edit] Wittgenstein in Moscow in 1939

The fully referenced note that Wittgenstein went from Berlin to Moscow in 1939 was reverted by Dannylost without any discussion whatever. Should Dannylost (or anyone!) have any reasons to justify the reversion, please discuss it here. Should nothing be forthcoming, I will put it back in a week. The edit also gave the 2008 value of the gold paid to the Reichsbank by the Wittgenstein family in 1939 as over US$50,000,000. This was also changed with no justification, despite the fact that the figure is correct. Editors should perhaps be a little more zealous in putting comments on the discussion page before acting, I think.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.107.219.113 (talk) 03:27, 16 January 2008

I didn't notice the monetary details. They should be put back. (BTW, the section jumps from one topic to another much too often. It's confusing, and details such as the gold's worth should rather be moved to footnotes.)
However referenced, I don't see any point to mention his visit to Moscow. Other travels written about in the paragraph are all related to the highly relevant issue, namely the efforts he made to save his family. This is not a fancy userpage, and not every country W visited should be mentioned. The fact is you didn't have anything more interesting to say about the visit, than that someone recalled it.
Regarding zealousness, I simply try to be bold, and get my intentions clear before entering long debates. The alternative is trying hard not to offense anyone, and having nothing get done in the end. In the same manner, you shouldn't wait a full week. I think most wikipedians prefer solving an issue and moving on, over following discussions that are being dragged for days or weeks.
Hope I haven't missed anything, trespassers william (talk) 13:51, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
This is not a fancy userpage, and not every country W visited should be mentioned. Why not? This is an encyclopedia. It communicates information. Where do we draw the line as to what information constitutes "fancy" information? Information that is trivial or unimportant to one person may be of great interest to another person. My friend Holmes demonstrated this on many occasions. Lestrade (talk) 15:58, 17 January 2008 (UTC)Lestrade
Tough one.
a. From the top of my mind: Information that is either built into an already represented subtopic in a relevant way, or comes in a well structured original chunk of its own. The Moscow fact may very well turn out to be relevant if info will be added about a way it influenced W's life or work, or even his family's.
b. WP should always be interesting at least to a distinct significant minority of readers. Because, you know, many come here to acquire general education. Anyone whose wish is to explore obscure details about W would rather turn to more comprehensive resources, simply because it is quite a hard work, writing them all down.
c. Turning to the policies, I found three possible backups for my position. from WP:NOT "merely being true, or even verifiable, does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia." From Wikipedia:The perfect article: "is of an appropriate length; it is long enough to provide sufficient information, depth, and analysis on its subject, without including unnecessary detail or information that would be more suitable in "sub-articles", related articles, or sister projects." and "reflects expert knowledge; it is grounded in fact and on sound scholarly and logical principles."
d. The last one brought me to some more speculation. Encyclopedic articles require a certain degree of reading comprehension. When isolated, a sentence should excite a "So What?", and yet be understood in light of the rest of the paragraph, and of course paragraphs should be written to allow this. Perhaps the only statements that are understandable, to an extent, independently of the subject matter, should be the introductory and explanatory ones, those that can guide a reader why any topic is important when it is not self-evidently so.
I can see I haven't answered very clearly (and overstressed your Why?). I hope these are helpful thumb rules anyway. trespassers william (talk) 19:16, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Those, like Dannylost, ignorant of the controversy surrounding Wittgenstein's relation to Russia should read the Wikipedia article "The Jew of Linz" on my book of the same name. Antony Flew (emeritus professor of Philosophy, University of Reading) has publicly stated that he was convinced by the book's arguments that Wittgenstein was the Trinity College don who recruited Blunt, Burgess, Philby and Maclean for the Comintern. It is therefore of enormous interest that Wittgenstein was in Moscow only weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland and immediately prior to the family payment of US$50,000,000 to the Reichsbank. These issues are documented in Moran's article and in the book "Wittgenstein's Poker", yet shied away from by Wittgenstein's hagiographic biographers. It is quite certain that had the British government known of the intention to pay Hitler US$50,000,000, that British citizenship would never have been granted to Wittgenstein. (Had the transfer been effected only weeks later, Wittgenstein would have faced hanging on a charge of aiding and abetting an enemy state in time of war.) This is not a small matter. It certainly ought to have been explicitly mentioned in any Wittgenstein biography, and is surely worth a few words in Wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kimberley Cornish (talk • contribs) 23:07, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
It is indeed interesting, then. However, if you want to claim something, claim it. Collect the relevant facts and write a paragraph about it, stating the claim clearly. Make it easier for readers to judge the claims, and for editors to improve and add upon them. Don't bother passing readers of remote sections with scattered facts, that might not add up for them when they browse away. (Of course, it can be made summarily and refer the reader to the book's article for the detailed theory.) trespassers william (talk) 00:29, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I could never understand why Wikipedia has so much room in its articles for information about references to popular culture, but is stingy about including genuine information. Is Wikipedia appealing to the MTV set by its willingness to fill articles about whether someone was mentioned in the film "The Matrix" or in a rap song by "50 Cent"? A few words about the fact that Wittgy was in Moscow in 1939 raises howls of protest, though. Youth must be served.Lestrade (talk) 01:36, 20 January 2008 (UTC)Lestrade

Upon reading the article that was listed as a reference for W. being in Russia in 1939, I wasn't convinced. The relevant passage: "Mrs Gornstein said, according to Drobnitsky, that Wittgenstein made a second trip to Moscow in 1939, when he still wanted to live and work in the USSR. She learned of this trip from Sophia Janovskaya, whom he visited." This is third-hand information, which I don't think is documented anywhere else. If we have any OTHER, confirming, more reliable evidence that W. was in Russia in 1939, let's see it, but at the moment I think it's far from widely acknowledged, and this article doesn't do much to rule out my doubts. Enigma00 (talk) 02:32, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

The issue here is not whether the worthy Enigma00 is personally convinced, but whether the edit is soundly referenced to a reputable academic source. Moran's article is the source of of all academic work on Wittgenstein's 1930s involvement with the Soviet Union and his article is referenced in Monk's now standard Wittgenstein biography "Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius". (p.643. of Monk's "Select Biography" - neophyte Wittgensteinians might peruse the other names that Monk includes in this to glean some idea of Moran's importance here.) Moran is a well known academic, whose 1973 book on the Tractatus was considered worthy of six pages in the "Philosophical Review" (Vol. 84, No. 4 Oct 1975, pp. 570-575), a review in "The Philosophical Quarterly" (Vol.25, no.98. Jan. 1975, pp.84-5,) and elsewhere. He researched Wittgenstein's visits to the Soviet Union and obtained the personal testimony of members of the Soviet Academy of Science. (This is somewhat different from hearsay.) His paper spawned a minor academic industry in the 1970s. What he wrote about Wittgenstein and the result of his researches into Wittgenstein's visits is clearly important. Now in contrast to Enigma00, the "talk" page shows that other people are convinced that the issue matters and should be in Wikipedia. Accordingly - and bearing in mind the status of Moran as a reputable writer - I intend to revert back to my original after allowing a week for discussion. I suggest that should any editor disagree with this, that he/she should provide reasons for obliterating mention of Moran's researches so that we can then seek third party Wikipedia adjudication on whether such obliteration is reasonable.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 09:09, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
This is rather tangential to the argument, but as the above commentator brought it up "Moran is a well known academic, whose 1973 book on the Tractatus was considered worthy of six pages in the "Philosophical Review" (Vol. 84, No. 4 Oct 1975, pp. 570-575), a review in "The Philosophical Quarterly" (Vol.25, no.98. Jan. 1975, pp.84-5,)" - I'm not sure what the definition of 'well known academic is', but the cited articles hardly count in favour of the point you are making. I don't know if you have access to JSTOR or not but if you do you'll notice that Goldstein's review in PQ is at best balanced (noting some interesting citations from the notebooks but finding fault with the central line of argument) whereas Stine's review in PR is overwhelmingly negative. It's hardly proof of an academic's standing to cite reviews which call their research into question. 128.232.243.176 (talk) 18:58, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I never called into question the author's credentials, nor his importance. All I'm saying is that if the ONLY source we have for W. being in Russia in 1939 is this third-hand information from a single paragraph in one article, that's pretty scant evidence. Your argument misses the point entirely; you deflect criticism about the strength of the evidence by referring instead to the reputation of the writer and his work. My point is, for such a grand claim (that is not attested elsewhere), we should like to have some grand evidence, better than a third-hand account. I'm not accusing anyone of being dishonest, I'm only pointing out that memory is fallible and that things get distorted when they don't come from the source. It is worth noting that other testimony from the article is surely mistaken (such as one Soviet philosopher's impression that W. was interested in dialectical materialism and was well versed in the history of Soviet philosophy; there is no textual evidence of this in the W. corpus, no second-hand accounts of this from his students and friends), as Monk points out in his book. It is also worth noting that the only reason Mr. Cornish is keen to have this information added is to serve certain academic vanities of his own, namely his widely discredited work 'The Jew of Linz'. Enigma00 (talk) 18:00, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Fortunately I am in a position to correct Enigma00 when he asserts that I want to have the information added "to serve certain academic vanities" of my own. I hereby inform him that this is not so. I trust that as a gentleman, he will therefore accept my correction, behave as a gentleman should and apologize. That is a matter for him. Now, on his claim that my work on Wittgenstein is "widely discredited" I simply point out that various of its arguments have been accepted by Antony Flew, Laurence Goldstein, Martin Gilbert and other well-known academic philosophers and historians. Flew's comment is quoted in the Wikipedia article "The Jew of Linz" and readers can peruse it at their leisure. The arguments of "The Jew of Linz", that is to say, are not "widely discredited" at all, though Enigma00 might better have expressed himself by writing (correctly) that they are not yet "widely accepted". This being a discussion page, I shall now turn to the matter of of how what I think is an important reference might be worded in a manner acceptable to Enigma00. I suggest that the entry might read something like "John Moran, who first reported that Wittgenstein had visited Russia in 1935, also quotes a Russian informant who states he was in Moscow in 1939 (following the Berlin negotiations) where he met the Soviet philosopher/academician Sophia Janowskaya a second time." Worded so, the comment is true and Janowskaya being the woman Stalin entrusted with translation of Marx' logical writings, the matter is philosophically relevant.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 04:25, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Setting aside polemical matters (for I have no wish to argue again about your work and/or its credibility/acceptability/etc.), I suppose we ought to come to the heart of the issue; why include this information at all? I quote trespassers william, who wrote above: "However referenced, I don't see any point to mention his visit to Moscow. Other travels written about in the paragraph are all related to the highly relevant issue, namely the efforts he made to save his family." As what you want added to the article doesn't really fit in in that context, I would suggest that it is an inappropriate place to put it (assuming we ought to include it at all). Mr. Cornish and I have disagreed before (and I will admit being in the wrong on more than one occasion), so I think we should have some other viewpoints in this discussion. I propose we ought to answer the following questions: 1) Is this information reliable; that is, is this one source, as it is, enough to warrant us thinking what it asserts is true? 2)If it is, is it necessary to include in the article? and 3) If we are going to include it, then where, since it doesn't seem to fit in where Mr. Cornish first put it? I think it's obvious where I stand, but I don't want to monopolize the discussion, nor do I want this to simply become a two-man battle that gets nowhere. Enigma00 (talk) 04:55, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for the civilised response. Let me state why the Moran report matters. You wrote that testimony from Moran's article "is surely mistaken (such as one Soviet philosopher's impression that W. was interested in dialectical materialism and was well versed in the history of Soviet philosophy; there is no textual evidence of this in the W. corpus, no second-hand accounts of this from his students and friends." Quite to the contrary, PI 284 contains a phrase about "the transition from quantity to quality" that is the very purest Engels. W's Preface atributes the most consequential ideas of the Investigations to Piero Sraffa, who was not only Cambridge's most eminent Marxist economist, but a mole for Stalin. (Reference in John Costello's "Mask of Treachery" which I do not have to hand.) His friend Roy Pascal translated Marx's "German Ideology" into English. His Communist friends and/or students included Maurice Dobb, Nicholas Bakhtin, George Thomson, Maurice Cornforth, David Hayden-Guest, Julian Bell, all of whom were Party members. (Monk, pp.340-54) and some of whom (Cornforth, Bell) wrote of W's influence on them. Rush Rhees was a Marxist, albeit of Trotskyite persuasion. (Rhees “Recollections of Wittgenstein”, pp.200-09) Monk records George Thomson as saying that Wittgenstein “supported Communism in practice” and Monk reports Wittgenstein saying "I am a communist, at heart" (Monk, p.343). Both Douglas Gasking and A. C. Jackson who were former communist students of Wittgenstein’s (and who ended up in the Chairs of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Monash University) told me personally that when they knew him, “Wittgenstein was a Stalinist”. (Monk reports that “some of his students” mentioned Wittgenstein’s Stalinism, but it was Gasking and Jackson - at one stage the most eminent philosophers in Australia – who made the remarks Monk mentions.) Fania Pascal reports that Wittgenstein read Marx (Rhees, “Recollections of Wittgenstein, p.44.) Rosa Lichtenstein has extended my own researches on Wittgenstein’s politics, writing “when Wittgenstein visited Russia he met Sophia Yanovskaya, who was Professor of Mathematical Logic at Moscow University and one of the co-editors of Marx's Mathematical Manuscripts. [Cf., Yanovskaya (1983), in Marx (1983).] She apparently advised him to "read more Hegel" (which suggests he had already read some). [Monk (1990), p.351, and Rhees (1984), p.209.] In fact, Yanovskaya even went as far as to recommend Wittgenstein for the chair at Kazan University (Lenin's old college) and for a teaching post at Moscow University (Monk (1990), p. 351). These were hardly posts one would have offered to just anyone in Stalin's Russia in the mid-1930's, least of all to one not sympathetic to Communism”. Keynes’ letter to Maisky, the Russian ambassador stated that Wittgenstein “has strong sympathies with the way of life which he believes the new regime in Russia stands for." [John Maynard Keynes to Maisky, quoted in Rhees, p.199, also quoted more fully in Monk (1990), p.349.] Alan Turing wrote that Wittgenstein “was trying to introduce "Bolshevism" into Mathematics”. Monk (1990), pp.419-20; see also Hodges (1983), pp.152-54.] In short, Wittgenstein is reasonably suspected (from even the Sraffa Preface acknowledgement alone) of being seriously influenced by Marxism, whether through direct reading or via his friends/students. Any meeting with Yanowskaya (as editor of Marx's works) whether in 1935 or in 1939, is therefore of biographical interest, provided it is properly referenced. Where the reference should go is certainly up for discussion. Over to you ... Kimberley Cornish (talk) 05:19, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
There is so much to reply to here, and I haven't had time recently and I may not have time for a little while yet. Suffice to say, I think that all of the above can be either refuted or (better) explained in a way that doesn't get you want you want. But then, of course, we get back into a debate about that which we said we wouldn't touch - your work and its whole thesis re: Wittgenstein. I fear it's quite unavoidable at this point, and it's a war that isn't likely to be won by either side, because you're not going to give up what you've written about and I'm not going to accept your points because I think the mass of scholarship is against you. But if I must, I will come back and tell what I think of all the points you made above. Enigma00 (talk) 07:19, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
You write about the debate "we said we wouldn't touch". Let me note, with a very raised eyebrow, that I said no such thing. Now, on your reply, it's rather hard to refute the fact that Wittgenstein's students described him as a "Stalinist" unless you want to claim that Monk's standard biography (p.354) is in error or that Gasking and Jackson were lying. Or should you take the "better" explanatory tack, I'd be very interested to see how you might try to explain away as harmless the significance of the "Stalinist" description. The 1935 recommendations of Wittgenstein to multiple high Soviet academic posts also seems damning on the face of it. I'd like to see your refutation of it. (Rather hard, methinks, unless Monk, Fania Pascal and Moran are again to be called into question!) Alternatively, on the other, "better", tack, let us see how you can explain it away as innocent, given that Yanovskaya was one of Stalin's "Red Professors" charged with with ideological supervision. (A good account of the ensuing murders is provided by Michael S. Fox in "Political Culture, Purges, and Proletarianization at the Institute of Red Professors, 1921-1929", Russian Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 Jan., 1993, pp. 20-42.) The purge at Kazan by the way, had already stated in February 1935 with the arrest of Professor Elvov PRIOR to her recommendation of Wittgenstein to the Chair and is detailed in Evgeniya Ginzburg's "Into the Whirlwind" (Collins, London 1967.) Ginzburg's book makes harrowing reading, with the female prisoners having to stop their ears at night to muffle the screams of prisoners - mainly arrested academics - being tortured every night by NKVD interrogators. (Ginzburg, p.122.) Yanovskaya had to watch her p's and q's about recommendations for professorial appointments or face torture and forced labour (like Ginzberg, for 18 years) herself. (The fact that Yanovskaya survived the Great Purge and the endless post war academic purges is evidence all by itself that she was a hardened apparatchik with blood on her hands.) If she recommended Wittgenstein, and he was politically unreliable, then her life was forfeit. (Ginzburg recounts some prisoners forced to "confess" by finger-nail extraction before they were shot.) So, yes, please either refute or explain away these and the other points I made. (After all, they were made in individual refutation of your own assertion about "there being no textual evidence" etc. and therefore demand a response. I stress that this has nothing to do with "where I am trying to get to"; merely with accuracy in disputation.) Finally, when you say that the "mass of scholarship" is against me, would you state specifically what reputable texts or journal articles you are referring to? Kimberley Cornish (talk) 06:40, 29 February 2008 (UTC)Kimberley Cornish (talk) 09:11, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
Enigma00's responses taking weeks (the original posting dating back to early January) I rather feel I should proceed with the suggested edit. (The thread had even been archived on the grounds that it was dead and only resurrected because it was a day short of the month's archive limit!) Contributors should surely try to make timely contributions. I note that Enigma00 did state that he was pressed for time, so I shall wait a day or two more.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 09:26, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
Here it goes. 1. "the transition from quantity to quality" has absolutely nothing to do with Engels in context, nor is it clearly derived from Engels, in fact it seems merely to be a common idiom. W. did take influence from Sraffa, but nowhere does he say that he was influenced by Sraffa's economics, nor his communism. Sraffa simply had a very sharp mind, and provided excellent criticism. Additionally, the claim that Sraffa was a mole for Stalin is highly controversial and I can find no authoritative, academically reputable sources to back it up. That his friends were Marxists is of little consequence. And just because they said W. influenced them doesn't mean he influenced them in their Marxism. Rhees was in fact a Marxist, but in fact, Rhees notes in 'Recollections of Wittgenstien' that when he told W. he was planning to join a Trotskyist party, W. advised him against it because in philosophy one always had to keep an open mind, and being part of a political party would force one to tow the party line and not be as open minded as a philosopher ought to be. That W. felt a deep sympathy for the idea of communism is not disputed, but this is a far cry from saying he was a full-blooded Stalinist; indeed, much biographical material goes against this (I'm thinking especially of Malcolm's memoir), and nothing W. ever wrote bears this out. You would expect such things to be evident in his less philosophical writing, like those published in 'Culture and Value', but no such writing exists. That two former students called him a 'Stalinist' is certainly outweighed by the fact that all his other students make no mention of it, and that all the biographical material on him speaks nothing to that effect. You're comments about Gasking and Jackson are a clear instance of an unwarranted appeal to authority; just because they were prominent philosophers gives them no more status than anyone else on where W.'s political sympathies lied. I wouldn't be surprised if Wittgenstein read Marx; many intellectuals did. To be told to "read more Hegel" doesn't imply that he had read SOME; the expression "you need to read more X" is idiomatic and means that one ought to read X, because it's clear from conversation that one hasn't. 'Alan Turing wrote that Wittgenstein “was trying to introduce "Bolshevism" into Mathematics”'; I don't even know what this is supposed to mean, and Turing is hardly qualified to speak to W.'s political sympathies. Turing's remark sounds more like an insult than a comment on W.'s ideas. Finally, the only reason you mentioned all this was to show that since W. had an interest in Marxism, a meeting with Yanowskaya is 'of biographical interest'. But this was not the point at all. The point was whether he went to the USSR in 1939, and you have provided no evidence whatever (except the original article, which I disputed for good reasons) for this. Enigma00 (talk) 01:45, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
My advice to Enigma00 would be that if he wants to dispute it, he should write an article and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal to see if he really does have "good reasons", as opposed to merely thinking that he does. I, on the other hand, am simply quoting from an already published peer-reviewed article by John Moran, whose research first turned up the evidence of Wittgenstein's 1935 Soviet visit, and which is now universally accepted as correct by all Wittgenstein commentators without exception. Wittgenstein met the official Soviet translator of Marx's mathematical manuscripts certainly once, in 1935, and if Moran has correctly reported what he was told by members of the Soviet Academy of Science, probably twice. I think this is worth a mention. Enigma00 doesn't. Further disputation seems rather pointless, therefore, after three months, I'm adding it to the Wikipedia main article text. Anyone is free to add whatever qualifications they feel are reasonable. Here is what I am adding: "John Moran, who first reported that Wittgenstein had visited Russia in 1935, quotes a Soviet Academician who (on the basis of testimony to him by the Academician Tatiana Gornstein) says that Wittgenstein was also in Moscow in 1939 (following the Berlin negotiations) where he met the Soviet philosopher/academician Sophia Janowskaya a second time. Janowskaya was the official translator of Marx's mathematical manuscripts and (as a graduate of the Institute of Red Professors) responsible for ideological oversight of Soviet academics. She recommended Wittgenstein to the Chair in Philosophy at Kazan (which had been Lenin's university) and other high Soviet academic posts." Nobody, I think can point to anything false or unsupported in this.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 04:12, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't think it's appropriate to suggest to Enigma that he should submit his research to a journal, because WP policy states that the burden is on the editor who wants to include material (i.e. in this case you) to show that the material is well sourced and worthy of inclusion. I've yet to make up my mind whether I think this should be included or not, but need to point out that the WP approach is that we must be guided by how our principal (secondary) sources deal with this material. From the discussion, I take it that Monk does not include this report, even though it was available to him? He must have had his reasons for that, and we should bear that in mind when we make our decisions. And did you include it in The Jew of Linz? If not, why not? You can call Monk's work "hagiography" as much as you like; it remains the standard biography and since it does not take a particular "line" on W's life whereas your book does, it should be given greater weight, while your viewpoint should also be represented. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:44, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
I've shortened it to what I think is an appropriate length but it must have a complete reference asap or it has to go. Also the stuff about the amount of gold must be cited to the E&E book, not to the very brief mention in a review of the book. Also urgent. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:54, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
I can live with what it's been shortened to, provided the (I think still questionable) reference is added. But I am also committed to the idea that the biography section is currently cluttered and a bit confused, and this certainly does nothing to remedy that. Enigma00 (talk) 16:43, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
To Itsmejudith: My shortness to Enigma00 was an expression of irritability over discussion responses taking a month and a feeling that he is unfamiliar with the literature relevant to the dispute. Sraffa, as it happens, was named as a mole by Michael Straight in his testimony to the FBI, referenced in John Costello's standard work on the Cambridge spies, "Mask of Treachery", which I referred in an earlier post to Enigma00. It is a frustrating business to have one's supporting references ignored. In addition, Enigma00's rejection of Gasking and Jackson's testimony as to Wittgenstein's Stalinism is based solely on the fact that others did NOT refer to his Stalinism, which is logically vacuous. (One would not dismiss Fania Pascal's testimony that Wittgenstein spoke Russian, for example, on the basis that some other authors fail to mention it.) Enigma00 might like to also check Trevor Redpath's "Student's Memoir" recounting Wittgenstein's reaction to a film of a landlord being murdered, that Redpath writes revealed Wittgenstein's political sympathies. With Monk, I consider Moran to be a reliable source. The 1939 visit was not mentioned in "The Jew of Linz" simply because I took the central issue to be the Soviet offer of the Chair at Lenin's university to Wittgenstein. One cannot include everything and the book had several chapters omitted because of space limitations anyway. (These were judged suitable for inclusion in the French edition by PUF.) In short, there is a point of view - by now, not just my own - that Wittgenstein's Cambridge activities were treasonable, and that can be supported by indisputable facts in the literature. The facts on which this view is based ought not be edited away from the Wikipedia article every time they are presented. Here, by the way, is some relevant material from Ray Monk supporting Turing's perception of Wittgenstein's radical Bolshevism: "The changes Wittgenstein wished to see are...I believe, so radical that the name 'full-blooded Bolshevism' suggests itself as a natural way to describe the militant tendency of his remarks." (http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/dlwg/ws03/08-1-95.txt) Monk's remark might help Enigma00 realize that Turing might simply have been right and not hard to understand at all.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 03:02, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
I apologize for not being as well read as Mr. Cornish clearly is. That Straight named Sraffa as a mole to the FBI is interesting, as is its reference in Costello's book, but does that make it true? Is that good evidence that it's true? That one man claimed it is no reason for us to take it as true; Mr. Cornish is merely seeing what he wants to see based on his own concerns. No other biographical source about Sraffa that I have checked mentions anything about his being a Soviet spy. My rejection of G. & J.'s testimony is not vacuous. Your counter-example fails, because Fania Pascal was in an excellent position to know whether or not W. spoke Russian, [i]because she taught him Russian[/i]. G. and J. were not in a similar position to know W.'s political leanings, and their testimony is not only not reflected in other accounts of W., but actually contradicted by it; see for example the quote I mentioned from Rhees' book in my last post (it seems I am not the only one to ignore supporting references). Monk DOES cite Moran, but does not cite the particular part of the article of interest here. Just because he cited part of that particular article gives us no reason to think all of the article is in order. The point in question is that Moran obtained this information from Drobnitsky, who got it from Mrs Gornstein, who got it from Sophia Janovskaya. Information of this nature, passed on orally through four people is bound to get confused, especially information regarding events in the past. What is more likely - that one of the three people in the pre-Moran chain of information made a mistake, or that every other W. biographer has failed to notice that W. went to the USSR again in 1939, at a time in which it would be highly unusual for him to do so? I submit to you that Ockham's razor is quite useful here. Your view of Wittgenstein is outlandish and, as I have said many times before, completely at odds with the picture painted of him by his closest friends and students, e.g. Rush Rhees, Norman Malcolm, GEM Anscombe, Peter Geach, and GH von Wright; not to mention accounts of him by others who knew him fairly well, such as Moore and Russell. By the way, I believe that your final quote from Monk is taken the wrong way; Monk is here agreeing that "Bolshevism" is an accurate characterization of W.'s philosophy of mathematics because of its RADICAL nature; that is, its complete break from traditional philosophy of math. As Monk notes, it is because of the 'militant tendency of the remarks' that the description is apt. He did not mean to agree that it was in some way Communist; in any case how a non-political area philosophy might be Communist is beyond me. Turing's remark, interpreted as meaning literally that W.'s philosophy is communist, is a bit cryptic, but as I said before it seems meant as an insult, not a serious criticism, and results, I think, from a lack of understanding of W.'s philosophy; something one shouldn't be surprised about. That said, why can't we leave the sentence as-is, as Itsmejudith changed it to, and be done with this? I have, after all, said I can live with it. Or do you have more controversial information just waiting to be added? Enigma00 (talk) 05:01, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Michael Straight's testimony is available by making an FOI request to the FBI. I have done this myself a number of times, though not (yet) for the Straight testimony. Costello, however, was a reliable source and there is no reason to doubt what he says. Whether Straight's testimony is sufficient to have nailed Sraffa (by then, I think, dead) as a mole, it certainly convinced the authorities that Blunt was a mole and in fact was sufficient to force his confession. ("Spycatcher", by Peter Wright, a former MI5 department head, provides some of the Blunt interrogation details, as it also does on the spying activities of Alistair Watson, another long-term Wittgenstein acolyte.) Enigma00 judges that Straight's naming Sraffa is only "one man" claiming it, that there "is no reason for us to take it as true" and even that "Mr. Cornish is merely seeing what he wants to see based on his own concerns." But the fact that the FBI notified the British security agencies as soon as Straight informed them and that Blunt confessed thereafter, speaks strongly to the fact that Straight was telling the truth, at least about about Blunt. One can take it for granted that Straight would have been questioned on every detail of his story by experienced professional interrogators. If Straight also named Sraffa, that is to say, then we can (all of us - not just me!) rest reasonably assured that Sraffa was a mole. On G & J's testimony, all I can say is that Gasking was a Party member at Cambridge. David Armstrong once said to me that in his opinion, Jackson (with whom he had worked at Melbourne) was even more left-wing that Gasking. I interviewed them both. Let me simply state that if G&J thought someone to be a Stalinist then he was a Stalinist, end of story - because they knew Cambridge communists and could judge. Both men had fallen foul of the Australian security authorities, as I detailed in "The Jew of Linz".and were keen judges of one's political orientation. (I believe they recommended academic appointments on that basis, but that is another story.) On the Janovskaya interviews, Moran reported as he reported, with great detail on precisely how he got the information. Is third hand information - even from Academicians less reliable than from first-hand sources? Of course. Can it therefore be dismissed? I think not. Whether or not my view of Wittgenstein "is outlandish" it is held by a steadily increasing number of academics, of whom Professor Flew is perhaps the most eminent. It is not made to be "outlandish" by the mere assertion that it is. On the "Bolshevik line" in areas other than philosophy and politics, Enigma00 should familiarise himself with the Lysenko case, in which lunatic biological doctrines gained Party endorsement, resulting in Vavilov and the academic cream of Russian Biology being deliberately starved to death. Stalin's articles on Linguistics destroyed the science in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Was there a Party line on Mathematics? There was a Party line on EVERYTHING, Mathematics included. Non-compliant Soviet Mathematicians were murdered in droves. (For one small example, do a Google search on "Yanovskaya Logic Denunciation Luzhin"). On Wittgenstein's comment to Rhees, my views on it were presented long ago in "The Jew of Linz" (as, incidentally, was also a note of Costello's reference to Sraffa as a mole, which might have saved Enigma00 some work had he read it.) Wittgenstein was there warning Rhees (then a student and not yet a philosopher) from deviating from the Party line. Trotsky paid for deviating from Stalinism with an ice-pick through his skull. Perhaps Rhees was lucky. (We ought remember that Alexander Litvinenko was murdered just over a year ago, so Russian elimination of political opponents was not just an aberration of the thirties.) On Itsmejudith's edit, yes, I can live with it too. Shall we call the matter closed?Kimberley Cornish (talk) 09:07, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. But I can't live with it, at least not while it remains uncited. The two citation needed tags must be replaced by references to appropriate texts or I will delete the sentences to which they relate. I am also a little concerned that Mr Cornish is getting confused between WP editing and his real-world research, hence frequently referring us back on this talk page to primary sources. To us it is irrelevant what Straight, Costello, Gasking, Yanovskaya et al might have said or done. All that is relevant is what secondary sources have made of it all since. Itsmejudith (talk) 18:33, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
On the 1.7 tonnes of Wittgenstein gold delivered to the Nazis, the reference is: Edmonds, David and Eidinow, John. "Wittgenstein’s Poker", Faber and Faber, London 2001, p.98. (I seem to be unable to edit the reference section on the main page.)Kimberley Cornish (talk) 22:15, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
I've amended the reference to the one you gave, Kimberley. References aren't actually edited in the reference section, but in the section of text that they are linked from - you can see how I did it at this diff [1]]. DuncanHill (talk) 22:30, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

My thanks to DuncanHill.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 05:10, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The other reference is: Moran, John. "Wittgenstein and Russia" New Left Review 73 (May-June, 1972), pp. 83-96. Incidentally, readers might have noticed the attempted poisoning of British academic Oleg Gordievsky, reported in all major British and world news media this very week. There is no reason to think anything was different in Stalin's time; in fact, quite the contrary. This writer therefore rather regrets the lack of detailed autopsy reports on Francis Skinner, Frank Ramsey and George Paul.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 21:45, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Where should the NLR ref go please? I can insert it for you if you wish (if you want to do it yourself, references are added by editing the section of text that they relate to, and putting <ref>REFERENCE GOES HERE</ref> ). DuncanHill (talk) 13:25, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you to DuncanHill again for the offer, but the reference is now inserted. I now have no objections should this thread be archived.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 21:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Religious categories

The subject is placed in a number of religious categories, but I am not sure if they are appropriate - certainly one of the cited sources states "Wittgenstein himself was baptized in a Catholic church and was given a Catholic burial, although between baptism and burial he was neither a practicing nor a believing Catholic" [2]. DuncanHill (talk) 11:43, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

This is a good point. It is a matter of debate just how religious W. was. He often talked of religion, and leading a religious life, but I don't think he meant by it what most would mean by 'a religious life'. He is also quoted as saying that he could "never bring [himself] to believe what they believe", referring to his Catholic friends. (See Norman Malcolm's Memoir) I propose we keep the ones that refer generically to him being Christian, as I think that may be fair, and to him being Jewish, as he was ethnically Jewish. But we can probably eliminate the ones that refer to him being a Roman Catholic. Enigma00 (talk) 18:05, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Even the Jewish ones may be problematical - to the Nazis he was Jewish, but by Orthodox traditions he wasn't - is there a policy or guideline which would be helpful to refer to here? I know this is an area which has the potential to produce much heat and little light, so if someone familiar with Wikipedia's practices/policies on religious cats could help us understand the appropriate way to categorize him that would be very helpful. DuncanHill (talk) 21:59, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Best to post a note at WikiProject Judaism. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:48, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
I have asked for input at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Judaism#Help_with_categorization_requested.. DuncanHill (talk) 13:36, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
The one response from the Judaism WikiProject is interesting, but I think I remember reading somewhere W.'s particular thoughts about his "Jewishness". I think they are quoted in Monk's biography, so I'll see if I can find them. Enigma00 (talk) 03:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Wittgenstein was halachically fully Jewish. He also claimed to be Jewish; in fact "the greatest of Jewish thinkers". His brother Paul and his sisters claimed in an American lawsuit that they were Jewish. His uncle Louis claimed the Wittgensteins were "pure-blood" Jews. Turn of the century Viennese newspapers castigated Karl Wittgenstein as another Jew in partnership with the Rothschilds and the Gutmanns in the steel cartel. (Jewish control of the Empire's heavy industry was in fact a universal rallying point of anti-Semitism.) The topic was raised in an earlier thread of the Wittgenstein discussion titled "Jewcentric ramblings" claiming that Wittgenstein was not Jewish, to which I responded with full references to the contrary. The thread is now archived, but having a peek at it might save a lot of work for others. Wittgenstein and his brother were in fact denied entry to a Viennese gymnasium because they were Jews, but the only issue that matters is the religious affiliation of Therese Zohrer (born in Steinbruckl) who was Wittgenstein's great-grandmother in the maternal line (Marie Stallner's mother). I have been given very good grounds to understand that she was Jewish and am currently awaiting further confirmatory documents from Austria. Given that both Wittgenstein and his family members claimed to be Jewish, that he was recognised in Vienna as Jewish and that he was Jewish by descent in the female line (an in all other lines!) there isn't any real scope for further argument. This topic shouldn't be being continually raised in ignorance of what has gone before. Readers should simply follow up on the religious affiliation of Therese Zohrer, who has been listed on a website of the University of Vienna by the cultural historian Dr Ursula Prokop.Kimberley Cornish (talk) 23:07, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
For once Mr. Cornish and I are in agreement. Given all that I have read on the subject, I believe that Wittgenstein thought of himself as Jewish (ethnically, not religiously), and indeed if his maternal great-grandmother was Jewish that's all the information we need. I think the more pressing question is whether or not W. belongs in certain of the Christian categories. Enigma00 (talk) 18:29, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] I've had a wonderful life

All this seriousness about Wittgenstein's philosophy! What if the psychologistic wag was right when he said that it was all merely a mental distraction to divert his thoughts from the painful tribulations of life?Lestrade (talk) 19:33, 12 April 2008 (UTC)Lestrade

[edit] Infobox: Notable Ideas

Luki's infobox is rather large, and I was thinking that "for a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language; the idea of a logically private language is incoherent; philosophical problems arise due to misuse of language" could be reduced to "meaning is use, private language argument, conceptual therapy." As these are notable ideas, they should be explained in the article. Indeed, private language argument has its own article. Therefore, we can do with some slight ambiguity in the infobox. Thoughts? Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 16:06, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm on the whole fine with that, with the exception of "conceptual therapy", which is lacking the right nuance. But at the moment I can't come up with anything better, so might as well go with it. Enigma00 (talk) 02:02, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
The term is used by Joyce Couture and Kai Nielsen to refer to Wittgenstein's solution to the puzzle of being tripped up by language. It's not perfect, but it at least has some currency. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 19:07, 7 May 2008 (UTC)