January 27, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Tractatus
The other book discussed by the group of Moritz Schlick was
Wittgenstein’s “TractatusLogico-Philosophicus” which is the Latin for
“Logico-Philosophical Treatise”.
The Vienna Circle found the book so fascinating that over months
they read it out aloud to each other, going through each and every line.
The group even invited the author to participate in the meeting.
Ludwig Wittgenstein the author was an unforgettable character, as
eccentric as it gets.
He attended the meetings very seldom, and even when he did, rather
than discuss his own work and philosophy he would render out the poems of
Rabindranath Tagore facing the wall.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was never concerned with wealth accumulation as
he inherited a colossal wealth when his father passed away in 1913.
The Wittgenstein family (Jewish) in the late 1800s and early 1900s
was the second richest family of Austro-Hungarian Empire; Only the Rothschild
Family (also Jewish) stood ahead of them in terms of wealth.
His father Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913) (a friend of Andrew
Carnegie) became an industrial tycoon by 1890 having a near-total control of the
entire iron and steel resources of the empire.
Wittgenstein often handed out huge monies in charity to artists
who were in serious financial despair.
In the end, he gave away nearly his entire fortune to his brothers
and sisters (they were in total a brood of nine siblings).
He even actively volunteered to fight in the front lines for the
Austro-Hungarian army during the World War I.
Somewhere during the war he read Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”
and so impressed was he with it that he could not help himself reading it over
and over till he had learnt by heart some of the passages.
And yet all this while, he was also working on his seminal book,
the Tractatus.
The Tractatus is essentially a book on linguistics (something
which Chomsky and his student Pinker are known for), language and its
relationship to reality.
We will take up this book in the nights to come and try to see
what was in it that generated so much interest in it and which set alight some
kind of spark in the mind of young Gödel.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
If you have a minute, I’d really appreciate it if you took a look at Emily’s Virtual Rocket. This is a serious newsblog which has been taken from serious e-newspapers and e-magazines from around the world, with an emphasis on transgender issues. Also, with his election, I look for articles which critique Donald Trump.
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