Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes (The Jewish Lives Series)

By: Anthony Gottlieb

Narrated by: Anthony Gottlieb

The first biography in more than three decades of the Austrian-born thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century

According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), philosophy is a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought and his place in the history of philosophy.

Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cultlike following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna.

Gottlieb’s meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him.

©2025 Anthony Gottlieb (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing

A fine synthesis between intellectual and personal progression

Gottlieb's writing is simply extraordinary: he is brief in his comprehensiveness, and brings to life and enigmatic and profound individual. I cannot praise Gottlieb's treatment of Wittgenstein's life enough.

A fine, concise biography.

This book is better on the life of the Greek philosopher than on his thought, but the strength of the volume is that it brings the life and the thought together in a number of stimulating ways.