Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Ray Monk is professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton in England. He studied Wittgenstein at Oxford University, and has also written an extensive biography about Russell. In an interview I did with Monk for a Norwegian newspaper, Monk emphasized that he admired Wittgenstein's intensity, and that he sees two important traits in Wittgenstein's personality: (1) his demand for intellectual clarity, (2) his demand for ethical perfection.

The book gives you insight into the person and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. One learns that Wittgenstein's life and philosophy are intimately connected, and one may wonder whether it is possible to understand Wittgenstein's work without knowing something about his life. Monk describes how the young Wittgenstein came into philosophy from engineering and mathematics. Wittgenstein showed an intense interest in philosophical problems, as Betrand Russell said "he had to understand or die". Wittgenstein studied in Cambridge, lived as a hermit in Norway, was a soldier under the first world war, a school teacher in Austria and professor in Cambridge. Monk describes Wittgenstein's life, and one may see how his life and philosophy are connected - for instance how the last part of Tractatus may be understood in light of the fact that Wittgenstein devloped a religious attitude to life and read Tolstoy intensively during the first world war.

Wittgenstein was a true philosopher. He gave himself to the problems, and he truly struggled with them. The book may be very inspiring for serious scholars in many fields, as well as writers, poets, philosophy students and many others.

Philosophy is more than a game of the name. Although Wittgenstein is very important to analytic philoophy, he must be understood as a thinker with a deep existential motivation. Althoug Wittgenstein was must be seen in relation to Frege and Russell, there are many other important writer that are important in relation to Wittgenstein, for instance Kant, Schopenhauer, Weininger, Kierkegaard and St. Augustine and others.

Monk's biography helps to see Wittgenstein's approach to both life and philosophy.

Contrary to the one reviewer below, the Bartley biography is one of the most notorious and irresponsible biographies of any philosopher of the 20th century. It is a travesty of scholarship, and an embarrassment to anyone with an critical eye. It is no secret that Wittgenstein was gay, but Bartley tries to prove (with no proof existing to this effect) that Wittgenstein engaged in a kind of sexual activity of the most promiscuous kind. His proof is of the sort: some guy I ran into in a gay bar in Manchester said he knew a guy who looked like Wittgenstein who liked to take rough boys out for a bit of fun. In short, we are not told who these sources were, which means that they cannot be further assessed as to reliability and veracity, not to mention the fact that his depiction of Wittgenstein contrasts markedly with what we know of Wittgenstein from well-documented sources. Not exactly the kind of evidence that scholars like to utilize in making their assertions. The Bartley biography suffers in equal parts from a lack of philosophical understanding on the part of Bartley and a willingness to credit the flimsiest sort of hearsay.

The Toulmin and Janik book is much better than the Bartley (I am somewhat biased as I took two seminars with Toulmin), but it is an attempt to articulate Wittgenstein's intellectual and cultural background, and is more of a supplement to a biography rather than actually being a biography.

The Monk biography is wonderfully human biography, which makes Wittgenstein come alive as a flesh and bone individual. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Wittgenstein or in 20th century philosophy.