Assembling Reminders: Studies in the Genesis of Wittgensteins Concept of Philosophy

by Allan Janik

Astonishingly, Wittgenstein insisted that he was not an original thinker but one who passionately seized upon the thoughts of truly original thinkers with a view to developing a method of conceptual clarification. He compared his mind to fertile ground in which the seeds of the truly original: Ludwig Boltzmann, Heinrich Hertz, Arthur Schopenhauer, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Otto Weininger, Oswald Spengler and Piero Sraffa, could blossom. Assembling Reminders is the first full length study to explore how these figures influenced Wittgenstein - but also how he could claim to have understood them better than they did themselves. It illuminates Wittgenstein's uniqueness in the history of 20th century thought at the same time that it clarifies his relationship to both analytical and Continental philosophy as well as to Viennese critical modernism. Allan Janik, (1941) is currently Research Fellow at the University of Innsbruck's Brenner Archives Reseach Institute. He is also Adjunct Professor for the Philosophy of Culture at the University of Vienna and at the Skill and technology Ph D. program at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology.

248 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2006