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Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore and Frege

Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore and Frege. These biographical notes concentrate on the period before the publication of Tractatus . I. Wittgenstein

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Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore and Frege

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  1. Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore and Frege • These biographical notes concentrate on the period before the publication of Tractatus. • I. Wittgenstein • 1889: Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April, the youngest child in one of the wealthiest families in the Hapsburg Empire. His father had made his fortune in iron and steel production. W was baptized in the Catholic church, the faith of his mother. • 1906: began to study engineering at the Technische Hochschule at Berlin-Charlottenburg. • 1908: traveled to England, first experimenting with kites in Derbyshire. In the autumn, he registered in engineering at Manchester, intending to study aeronautics.

  2. Wittgenstein 1912 - 1919 • 1912: On the advice of Frege, W registered at Trinity College, Cambridge, to study the foundations of mathematics with Russell. • 1913 - 1914: lived in a hut he built for himself at Skjolden, near Bergen, Norway. • 1914 - 1919: First as a volunteer, later as a trained officer, W served in the Austrian army on the river Vistula, in an artillery workshop, on the eastern front and in northern Italy. In October 1918, the Italians took him prisoner and held him in Monte Cassino. W had completed the Tractatus while on leave in August 1918.

  3. Wittgenstein 1919 - 1928 • 1919 - 1920: trained as a schoolmaster in Vienna. • 1920 - 1926: taught in village schools in lower Austria. • 1921: Tractatus published as the final issue of Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie. Ogden’s translation appeared the following year. • 1926 - 1928: worked with Paul Engelmann as an architect in Vienna, designing a mansion for his sister Margarete.

  4. Wittgenstein 1927 - 1939 • 1927: began to meet regularly with members of the Vienna Circle, among them Carnap, Feigl, Schlick and Waismann. • 1929: returned to Cambridge as a research student. W submitted Tractatus as a PhD thesis. He received the PhD in June, examined by Moore and Russell. • 1930: named a fellow of Trinity College. With some interruptions, W would lecture at Cambridge until 1947. • 1939: appointed Professor of Philosophy upon Moore’s retirement.

  5. Wittgenstein 1941 - 1953 • 1941 - 1944: served first as a dispensary porter at Guy’s Hospital in London and later as a laboratory assistant in a medical research unit in Newcastle. • 1951: From 1949, W suffered from prostate cancer. On 29 April, he died in Cambridge at the home of his doctor. He was buried as a Catholic at St. Giles in Cambridge. • 1953: Philosophical Investigations appeared, translated by E. Anscombe and edited by Anscombe and R. Rhees, his onetime students. W had been at work on PI intermittently since 1936.

  6. Russell 1872 - 1894 • 1872: Bertrand Arthur William, Third Earl Russell, was born into the aristocratic family of Lord John Russell, the reform prime minister. R’s early life was greatly influenced by British reform politics and the liberalism of J.S. Mill, a friend to his parents. • 1876: was orphaned. R would be raised by his grandmother. • 1890 - 1894: study of mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, before turning to philosophy. A major influence on his philosophical thinking was the British neo-Hegelianism or idealism of Bradley, McTaggart and Ward, his tutor.

  7. Russell 1895 - 1898 • 1895 - 1901: fellow of Trinity College. • 1897: published his first book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, intended to be a contribution to a planned, but never completed, idealist encyclopedia of the special sciences. • 1898: Together with his Cambridge colleague G.E. Moore, R abandoned idealism for an extreme form of realism.

  8. Russell 1900 - 1903 • 1900: published A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. R encountered the symbolic logic of Giuseppe Peano at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris. • 1901: discovered the paradox that bears his name, thus revealing that contradictions exist in Frege’s system of the Grundgesetze and in Cantor’s approach to set theory. • 1903: published The Principles of Mathematics. After completing the bulk of the Principles, R came to realize the import of the thought of German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege.

  9. Russell 1905 - 1910 • 1905: Russell published “On denoting,” the article that was to become paradigmatic for analytical philosophy; its ideas would contribute to the ‘no class’ theory of the Principia and Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. • 1908: In “Mathematical logic as based on the theory of types,” Russell thought to present a distinctive theory of types capable of resolving the paradoxes, while permitting a deductive development of pure mathematics. • 1910: appointed lecturer at Cambridge

  10. Russell 1910 - 1912 • 1910-1913: published, in collaboration with A.N. Whitehead, the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, the result of over ten years of research into the foundations of mathematics. PM still represents the most extensive and detailed attempt to demonstrate the thesis of logicism, shortly, that the truths of mathematics can be deduced by purely logical rules from principles which are themselves purely logical. • 1912: published his philosophical ‘shilling shocker,’ Problems of Philosophy.

  11. Russell 1912 - 1916 • 1912: published his philosophical ‘shilling shocker,’ Problems of Philosophy. • 1914: Our Knowledge of the External World appeared, an effort to apply the logical constructs of PM to epistemological questions. • 1916: dismissed from his Cambridge lectureship for pacifism.

  12. Russell 1918 - 1921 • 1918: delivered the popular lectures on which The Philosophy of Logical Atomism were based. R was jailed for six months for writing an article in the pacifist journal The Tribunal. While in jail, he completed his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. • 1921: published The Analysis of Mind, endorsing the view of neutral monism as advocated by Mach and James.

  13. Russell 1950 and 1970 • 1950: awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. • 1970: died on 28 February, just prior to his 98th birthday.

  14. Moore 1873 - 1904 • 1873: George Edward Moore was born in Upper Norwood, a London suburb, of Quaker ancestry on his mother’s side. • 1892 - 1896: student at Trinity College, Cambridge, first in classics, later in philosophy. • 1898 - 1904: fellow of Trinity College, elected after writing a dissertation on Kant’s ethics. During this period, Moore and Russell initiated their criticism of idealism.

  15. Moore 1903 - 1911 • 1903: M’s article “The Refutation of Idealism” appeared, arguing that the putative basic assumptions of idealism are empty or false. He published his major work on ethics, Principia Ethica, which maintained that the principal problem of ethics is, “How is the word ‘good’ to be defined?” • 1911: returned to Cambridge as university lecturer.

  16. Moore 1921 - 1925 • 1921 - 1947: editor of the influential periodical Mind. • 1925: succeeded James Ward as professor of mental philosophy and logic in Cambridge and again named fellow of Trinity College. M published his “A Defense of Common Sense,” arguing that both idealists and philosophical skeptics rely upon claims which are either false or self-contradictory.

  17. Moore 1939 and 1950 • 1939: retired from his Cambridge professorship. • 1958: died in Cambridge.

  18. Frege 1848 - 1918 • 1848: born in Wismar, in northern Germany. • 1874 - 1918: After completing a doctorate in mathematics at Göttingen, he taught mathematics at the University of Jena until his retirement.

  19. Frege 1879 • 1879: published Begriffsschrift (Conceptual Notation), containing a formal language and unitary deductive calculus for propositional, predicate and higher-order logic in essentially their modern, quantified forms. It also contains a theory of mathematical induction based on the notion of the ancestral of a relation.

  20. Frege 1884 and 1892 • 1884: published Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (The Foundations of Arithmetic), a nontechnical account of his logicism and his definition of number in terms of one-to-one correspondence. • 1892: The article “On sense and reference” appeared, introducing the distinction between the reference or Bedeutung and the sense or Sinn of proper names and other linguistic units.

  21. Frege 1893 and 1903 • 1893 and 1903: published two volumes (of a planned three) of Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetic (The Basic Laws of Arithmetic), an endeavor to work out the logicist thesis in complete detail by formalizing the claims of the Grundlagen in a modified form of the Begriffsschrift notation.

  22. Frege 1902 - 1923 • 1902: Just prior to the second volume of Grundgesetze going to press, F received Russell’s letter containing a version of the latter’s paradox. To his bitter disappointment, F would never succeed in repairing his logicist system. • 1919 - 1923: published a series of three articles, including Der Gedanke, intended to form the opening chapters in a book on philosophical logic. The book was left uncompleted at F’s death.

  23. Frege 1925 • 1925: died and was buried in Bad Kleinem in northern Germany.

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