Status Updates From Wittgenstein's Vienna

Worked my way through rather drab sections on Loos, Schönberg, Hofmannsthal, and Musil, the “cultural critics” of fin de siècle Vienna. Then, Janik and Toulmin presumably begin to trace the origin of concerns about language, ethics, and the metaphysical (as it relates to science) up to Wittgenstein. They begin with Mauthner, then Mach, Hertz, Boltzmann, the critical philosophy of Kant, and next Schopenhauer.

I truly underestimated how much emphasis is placed on Wittgenstein’s influences instead of how it influenced the man himself. It’s strange because I don’t yet see how the history of fin de siècle Vienna, the satirist Karl Kraus, or the Austrian secession influenced Wittgenstein’s thought. I must have underestimated the aim of this book then, but I’ll read on.

Finished. Still not sure this isn’t just Wittgenstein freaking out about Hume’s Is/Ought distinction, plus ignoring metalanguages and Turing. (Who, my supervisor noted, was lecturing at Cambridge on following rules while Wittgenstein was complaining about it.)

End ch 8

p 254 surprising analogy btw modernism & logic, badly scanned

the deeper human purposes that it was the functio
novel techniques to serve have too often been ignored if
orgotten. So, poetic techniques and forms have become more
pportant than poetic expression, the construction of quasi-
Systems of inductive logic more important than
and style more important than

Uh oh:

P. 248: From this time on, aesthetic judgement was to be the prime concern, not of an individual patron (be he bishop or archduke) nor of the great bourgeois public. Instead, artists would have the opportunity to organize their own affairs …

Finished ch 7, looked at https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/19/ar...

Started ch 7, e.g. Haus Wittgenstein

P. 191 The evidence that Wittgenstein’s aim in the Tractatus was as much ethical as logical cannot, accordingly, be looked for within the book itself.