Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Gets Adapted Into an Avant-Garde Comic Opera — openculture.com

Ludwig Wittgenstein, enfant terrible or idiot savant? A student of the great Bertrand Russell and protégé of renowned mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege, the angry young upstart’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus put both elder thinkers on notice: The days of their comfortable assumptions were numbered, in a series of austere, cryptic aphorisms and symbolic propositions that make very little sense to those of us who lack the prodigious intellects of Russell and Frege. While Wittgenstein is often dismissed, writes Paul Horwich at New York Times’ philosophy blog “The Stone,” as “self indulgently obscure,” perhaps the real reason many academic philosophers reject his work is that it renders them superfluous. Philosophy, Wittgenstein obliquely claimed in his half-mystical, hyper-logical treatise, “can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.”

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