Ludwig Wittgenstein: An Intellectual Biography | Miles Hollingworth
After the triumph of his intellectual biography Saint Augustine of Hippo, Miles Hollingworth turns his attention to one of Augustine's greatest contemporary admirers: the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein has had more influence on postwar philosophical investigation than almost any other and was the de facto founder of the major movement logical positivism. Yet he was also an Austrian Jewish refugee and a heedless ascetic, who lived a tortured existence in his final years at Trinity College Cambridge.Hollingworth continues to pioneer a new kind of biographical writing: here the ingredients are the hypersensitivities of Viennese society in the last part of the 19th Century, the Wittgenstein family's Carnegie-like wealth, Ludwig's mother's tightrope between hysteria and sentimentality, his brothers' suicides--all compounded with the academic disciplines of mathematical, linguistic, and historical philosophy. This combination created a trajectory of genius and eccentricity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: An Intellectual Biography | 
