[8] Despite his position, only one book of his philosophy was published during his entire life: the 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise, 1921), which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Wittgenstein left academia several times: serving as an officer on the front line during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages, where he encountered controversy for using sometimes violent corporal punishment on both girls and boys (see, for example, the Haidbauer incident), especially during mathematics classes; working during World War II as a hospital porter in London; and working as a hospital laboratory technician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne.

[31][32] Karl and Poldi had nine children in all – four girls: Hermine, Margaret (Gretl), Helene, and a fourth daughter Dora who died as a baby; and five boys: Johannes (Hans), Kurt, Rudolf (Rudi), Paul – who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in World War I – and Ludwig, who was the youngest of the family.

Anthony Gottlieb tells a story about Paul practising on one of the pianos in the Wittgensteins' main family mansion, when he suddenly shouted at Ludwig in the next room:I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!

The second eldest brother, Kurt, an officer and company director, shot himself on 27 October 1918 just before the end of World War I, when the Austrian troops he was commanding refused to obey his orders and deserted en masse.

[59] Historian Brigitte Hamann writes that he stood out from the other boys: he spoke an unusually pure form of High German with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable.

In his leaving certificate, he received a top mark (5) in religious studies; a 2 for conduct and English, 3 for French, geography, history, mathematics and physics, and 4 for German, chemistry, geometry and freehand drawing.

With age, a deepening personal spirituality led to several elucidations and clarifications, as he untangled language problems in religion—attacking, for example, the temptation to think of God's existence as a matter of scientific evidence.

While Wittgenstein would later claim that "[m]y thoughts are 100% Hebraic",[99] as Hans Sluga has argued, if so, His was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in Weininger's case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius.

[103] He arrived at the Victoria University of Manchester in the spring of 1908 to study for a doctorate, full of plans for aeronautical projects, including designing and flying his own plane.

[107] Jim Bamber, a British engineer who was his friend and classmate at the time, reported that when things went wrong, which often occurred, he would throw his arms around, stomp about, and swear volubly in German.

[121] The club became infamous within popular philosophy because of a meeting on 25 October 1946 at Richard Braithwaite's rooms in King's College, Cambridge, where Karl Popper, another Viennese philosopher, had been invited as the guest speaker.

Pinsent wrote I have to be frightfully careful and tolerant when he gets these sulky fits and I am afraid he is in an even more sensitive neurotic state just now than usual when talking about Wittgenstein's emotional fluctuations.

[134] Additionally, in the 1920s Wittgenstein fell in love with a young Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger, sculpting a bust modelled on her and seriously considering marriage, albeit on condition that they would not have children; she decided that he was not right for her.

[141]He wrote in May 1912 that Wittgenstein had just begun to study the history of philosophy: He expresses the most naive surprise that all the philosophers he once worshipped in ignorance are after all stupid and dishonest and make disgusting mistakes!

[149] Brian McGuinness notes that a letter from Wittgenstein to Moore of 7 May 1914 indicates that he had intended to submit an essay he referred to as "Logik" as the dissertation required for his completion of a bachelor's degree.

Moore, though himself secretary of the relevant Moral Sciences degrees committee, showed the essay to Walter Morley Fletcher – perhaps, McGuinness suggests, "for an impartial opinion from an outsider" – and had "been told that it could not possibly pass for a dissertation" and wrote to Wittgenstein accordingly,[150]

[156] He was decorated with the Military Merit Medal with Swords on the Ribbon, and was commended by the army for "exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism" that "won the total admiration of the troops".

[166] In 1916 Wittgenstein read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov so often that he knew whole passages of it by heart, particularly the speeches of the elder Zosima, who represented for him a powerful Christian ideal, a holy man "who could see directly into the souls of other people".

And in fact both were right and both wrong; though the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have an acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.An English translation was prepared in Cambridge by Frank Ramsey, a mathematics undergraduate at King's commissioned by C. K. Ogden.

Monk writes that the purpose of these confessions was notto hurt his pride, as a form of punishment; it was to dismantle it – to remove a barrier, as it were, that stood in the way of honest and decent thought.

[204]I am not interested in erecting a building, but in [...] presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings.In 1926 Wittgenstein was again working as a gardener for a number of months, this time at the monastery of Hütteldorf, where he had also inquired about becoming a monk.

[215] Wittgenstein began to investigate acquiring British or Irish citizenship with the help of Keynes, and apparently had to confess to his friends in England that he had earlier misrepresented himself to them as having just one Jewish grandparent, when in fact he had three.

[217] Anthony Gottlieb writes that the pretext was that their paternal grandfather had been the bastard son of a German prince, which allowed the Reichsbank to claim foreign currency, stocks and 1700 kg of gold held in Switzerland by a Wittgenstein family trust.

[219] Norman Malcolm, at the time a post-graduate research fellow at Cambridge, describes his first impressions of Wittgenstein in 1938: At a meeting of the Moral Science Club, after the paper for the evening was read and the discussion started, someone began to stammer a remark.

Wittgenstein's teachings in the years 1940–1941 were used in the mid-1950s by Lambridis to write a long text in the form of an imagined dialogue with him, where she begins to develop her own ideas about resemblance in relation to language, elementary concepts and basic-level mental images.

[235] While Wittgenstein was at Guy's he met Basil Reeve, a young doctor with an interest in philosophy, who, with R. T. Grant,[236] was studying the effect of wound shock[237] (a state associative to hypovolaemia[238]) on air-raid casualties.

Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.Wittgenstein resigned from the professorship at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing, and in 1947 and 1948 travelled to Ireland, staying at Ross's Hotel in Dublin and at a farmhouse in Redcross, County Wicklow, where he began the manuscript MS 137, volume R.[245] Seeking solitude he moved to a holiday cottage in Rosroe overlooking Killary Harbour, Connemara owned by Drury's brother.

[271] Duncan J. Richter of the Virginia Military Institute, writing for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has described Wittgenstein as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and regarded by some as the most important since Immanuel Kant.

The earlier Wittgenstein, whom I knew intimately, was a man addicted to passionately intense thinking, profoundly aware of difficult problems of which I, like him, felt the importance, and possessed (or at least so I thought) of true philosophical genius.