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Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes
The first biography in more than three decades of the Austrian-born thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century
According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), philosophy is a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought and his place in the history of philosophy.
Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cultlike following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna.
Gottlieb’s meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him.
According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), philosophy is a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought and his place in the history of philosophy.
Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cultlike following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna.
Gottlieb’s meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him.
209 pages, Hardcover
Published October 21, 2025
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239 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Gottlieb
21 books146 followersAnthony Gottlieb is a British writer, former Executive Editor of The Economist, historian of ideas, and the author of The Dream of Reason. He was educated at Cambridge University and has held visiting fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford, and Harvard University. He has taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and the New School in New York, and been a visiting scholar at New York University and fellow at the Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the series editor of The Routledge Guides to the Great Books.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 23, 2025
The first biography of Wittgenstein in 35 years. While the author has not himself uncovered new material, he is deeply familiar with all the material relevant to Wittgenstein's life and views, and much of this has only come to light in the last 30 years or so. So it was time for a new biography.
The book is not long (165 pages of text, 25 pages of endnotes) and this is a bit of a disappointment, though it may well have been limited by the publisher. The book is fairly light on the philosophy and much more focussed on the life. Given the short length, this was a good idea.
There is no particular unifying theme to the story. I was surprised that the subtitle ("Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes") did not actually figure in the story. And while the book appears in a series called "Jewish Lives" (and there is a fair bit of detail about how being somewhat Jewish impacted or figured in Wittgenstein's life), that also did not become a theme in the story.
But...the book is well-written and researched, and the story is very well-told. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Wittgenstein, even for philosophical novices.
The book is not long (165 pages of text, 25 pages of endnotes) and this is a bit of a disappointment, though it may well have been limited by the publisher. The book is fairly light on the philosophy and much more focussed on the life. Given the short length, this was a good idea.
There is no particular unifying theme to the story. I was surprised that the subtitle ("Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes") did not actually figure in the story. And while the book appears in a series called "Jewish Lives" (and there is a fair bit of detail about how being somewhat Jewish impacted or figured in Wittgenstein's life), that also did not become a theme in the story.
But...the book is well-written and researched, and the story is very well-told. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Wittgenstein, even for philosophical novices.
January 15, 2026
There is a small industry of Wittgenstein biographies, still led by Ray Monk’s The Duty of Genius. But there’s room for more, and I found Gottleib’s book interesting for several reasons.
One is his account of Wittgenstein’s family history. We knew of the family wealth but not as much about his father, Karl’s attachment to an “American” way of thinking about business and achievement. Karl wanted badly to pass along an industrious and entrepreneurial temperament to his sons. He particularly wanted to see his sons follow him into industry, manufacturing, and engineering. The “airplanes” in the book’s subtitle references Wittgenstein’s own interests in aeronautics (he received a patent for a unique propeller design). The fates and achievements of Karl’s sons and daughters tell a story of pressure, with tragedy and greatness spilling all around.
Gottlieb goes farther back as well to find Wittgenstein’s roots in Jewish European culture, with its headwinds and tailwinds. The book is itself part of a series of books on “Jewish Lives.”
Wittgenstein’s aristocratic background isn’t just a matter of financial power. The family was a social and cultural power, with artists and composers frequently visiting and providing influence at the “Palais Wittgenstein.”
An aristocratic personality isn’t necessarily a good thing for anybody. We knew of Wittgenstein’s own troubled and troubling personality. By many accounts he was just a hard person to be around. On his return to Cambridge after his long absence in Norway and Austria, John Maynard Keynes wrote to his wife, Lydia, “Pray for me.” What’s remarkable about this from Keynes is that it’s coming from a man we’d imagine to have an impregnable sense of confidence and self-worth, not easily harmed by the worst of difficult personalities. But Wittgenstein was on the very high end of the spectrum of difficult personalities, frequently referring to those around him as “muck” or “vile” or just plain “stupid.” It seems, by Gottlieb’s account to have been a family trait, or a family curse.
Wittgenstein’s relationships at Cambridge were always volatile. He so offended G.E. Moore that the two of them didn’t speak for fifteen years, despite at other times having a close intellectual relationship. He broke off his friendship with Bertrand Russell, although maintaining a purely intellectual relationship. Outbursts of disdain and disrespect were just part of the deal in relationships, although those over-developed facets of Wittgenstein’s persanality may have been exaggerated, by Gottlieb’s account, in his relationships with other intellectuals, while he could be downright playful in other circumstances.
Wittgenstein’s dismissive disdain for many around him was also directed back on himself. I suppose if you’re going to be insulting, you may as well include yourself for the sake of consistency. Gottlieb writes, “His charismatic gift was to be halting, self-deprecating, and imperious all at the same time.” Deprecating others can be superior but it doesn’t have to be.
Wittgenstein was also prone to developing “love” relationships, sometimes reciprocated and sometimes not. For the most part, these were with younger men within his intellectual circle, and some were long-lasting, as with David Pinset and with Ben Richards. Gottlieb also gives some accounting of Wittgenstein’s relationship with Marguerite Respinger (see Wittgenstein’s diaries from the period of that relationship, published as Movements of Thought, for Wittgensteisn’s own reflections).
Gottlieb’s book is not a philosophical critique of Wittgenstein’s work, but he does offer some provocative insights into Wittgenstein’s intellectual and philosophical development. It’s more intellectual biography than philosophy or pure biography, and his thoughts on that level are, I think, the strength of the book.
In particular, Gottlieb calls attention to a change in Wittgenstein’s philosophical perspective and temperament after his time teaching schoolchildren in Austria. The Tractatus, written before that time, is declarative and definite. Wittgenstein even regarded himself as having solved the major problems of philosophy with that one short, somewhat enigmatic book.
His writing after that (see the Philosophical Investigations) is questioning and experimental, even a bit humble on a philosophical level. And, perhaps owing to his experiences with the schoolchildren, as Gottlieb emphasizes, Wittgenstein now puts at the center of his thoughts about language and mathematics questions about how something, e.g., the meaning of a word, is learned (see, for example, the opening discussion of Augustine and how a language might be learned in the Investigations). His practice of examining language through “primitive language games” may also reflect a new regard for the simpler levels at which schoolchildren begin and at which they grow adept, as opposed to the more convoluted language games of philosophers.
One of the points that Gottlieb makes about the whole of Wittgenstein’s work is his quest, maybe obsession, with clarity. The Tractatus, even though enigmatic, strives for a simple clarity about the relationship between language and reality and about the limits of language. His later work, in the Investigations and also in the posthumously published notebooks, read from this perspective like an heroic attempt to clear the overgrowth and underbrush around language as a natural and primarily pragmatic activity, without pretension or complexity.
All biographies of Wittgenstein tend to have this quality of throwing new and different light on why he practiced philosophy in the way that he did, and how this philosophical activity bears a relationship with his own somewhat tortured inner life. This was a man who constantly thought about and examined himself, maybe trying to clear that same overgrowth and underbrush from his own character.
One is his account of Wittgenstein’s family history. We knew of the family wealth but not as much about his father, Karl’s attachment to an “American” way of thinking about business and achievement. Karl wanted badly to pass along an industrious and entrepreneurial temperament to his sons. He particularly wanted to see his sons follow him into industry, manufacturing, and engineering. The “airplanes” in the book’s subtitle references Wittgenstein’s own interests in aeronautics (he received a patent for a unique propeller design). The fates and achievements of Karl’s sons and daughters tell a story of pressure, with tragedy and greatness spilling all around.
Gottlieb goes farther back as well to find Wittgenstein’s roots in Jewish European culture, with its headwinds and tailwinds. The book is itself part of a series of books on “Jewish Lives.”
Wittgenstein’s aristocratic background isn’t just a matter of financial power. The family was a social and cultural power, with artists and composers frequently visiting and providing influence at the “Palais Wittgenstein.”
An aristocratic personality isn’t necessarily a good thing for anybody. We knew of Wittgenstein’s own troubled and troubling personality. By many accounts he was just a hard person to be around. On his return to Cambridge after his long absence in Norway and Austria, John Maynard Keynes wrote to his wife, Lydia, “Pray for me.” What’s remarkable about this from Keynes is that it’s coming from a man we’d imagine to have an impregnable sense of confidence and self-worth, not easily harmed by the worst of difficult personalities. But Wittgenstein was on the very high end of the spectrum of difficult personalities, frequently referring to those around him as “muck” or “vile” or just plain “stupid.” It seems, by Gottlieb’s account to have been a family trait, or a family curse.
Wittgenstein’s relationships at Cambridge were always volatile. He so offended G.E. Moore that the two of them didn’t speak for fifteen years, despite at other times having a close intellectual relationship. He broke off his friendship with Bertrand Russell, although maintaining a purely intellectual relationship. Outbursts of disdain and disrespect were just part of the deal in relationships, although those over-developed facets of Wittgenstein’s persanality may have been exaggerated, by Gottlieb’s account, in his relationships with other intellectuals, while he could be downright playful in other circumstances.
Wittgenstein’s dismissive disdain for many around him was also directed back on himself. I suppose if you’re going to be insulting, you may as well include yourself for the sake of consistency. Gottlieb writes, “His charismatic gift was to be halting, self-deprecating, and imperious all at the same time.” Deprecating others can be superior but it doesn’t have to be.
Wittgenstein was also prone to developing “love” relationships, sometimes reciprocated and sometimes not. For the most part, these were with younger men within his intellectual circle, and some were long-lasting, as with David Pinset and with Ben Richards. Gottlieb also gives some accounting of Wittgenstein’s relationship with Marguerite Respinger (see Wittgenstein’s diaries from the period of that relationship, published as Movements of Thought, for Wittgensteisn’s own reflections).
Gottlieb’s book is not a philosophical critique of Wittgenstein’s work, but he does offer some provocative insights into Wittgenstein’s intellectual and philosophical development. It’s more intellectual biography than philosophy or pure biography, and his thoughts on that level are, I think, the strength of the book.
In particular, Gottlieb calls attention to a change in Wittgenstein’s philosophical perspective and temperament after his time teaching schoolchildren in Austria. The Tractatus, written before that time, is declarative and definite. Wittgenstein even regarded himself as having solved the major problems of philosophy with that one short, somewhat enigmatic book.
His writing after that (see the Philosophical Investigations) is questioning and experimental, even a bit humble on a philosophical level. And, perhaps owing to his experiences with the schoolchildren, as Gottlieb emphasizes, Wittgenstein now puts at the center of his thoughts about language and mathematics questions about how something, e.g., the meaning of a word, is learned (see, for example, the opening discussion of Augustine and how a language might be learned in the Investigations). His practice of examining language through “primitive language games” may also reflect a new regard for the simpler levels at which schoolchildren begin and at which they grow adept, as opposed to the more convoluted language games of philosophers.
One of the points that Gottlieb makes about the whole of Wittgenstein’s work is his quest, maybe obsession, with clarity. The Tractatus, even though enigmatic, strives for a simple clarity about the relationship between language and reality and about the limits of language. His later work, in the Investigations and also in the posthumously published notebooks, read from this perspective like an heroic attempt to clear the overgrowth and underbrush around language as a natural and primarily pragmatic activity, without pretension or complexity.
All biographies of Wittgenstein tend to have this quality of throwing new and different light on why he practiced philosophy in the way that he did, and how this philosophical activity bears a relationship with his own somewhat tortured inner life. This was a man who constantly thought about and examined himself, maybe trying to clear that same overgrowth and underbrush from his own character.
January 23, 2026
The Tractatus doesn’t refute the Philosophical Investigations, rather it teaches you how to read it.
Similarly this biography teaches you how to read Wittgenstein better.
As Wittgenstein himself once wrote, “The joy I take in my thoughts (philosophical thoughts) is the joy of
my own strange life. Is that joie de vivre?”
+ Later in life, he said that a philosopher is “someone with a head full of question marks.”
Similarly this biography teaches you how to read Wittgenstein better.
As Wittgenstein himself once wrote, “The joy I take in my thoughts (philosophical thoughts) is the joy of
my own strange life. Is that joie de vivre?”
+ Later in life, he said that a philosopher is “someone with a head full of question marks.”
January 20, 2026
This is a decent brief portrait of LW as a person, with the spotlight on his relationships with others rather than on the niceties of his philosophical positions. No private language, I guess, huh? Gottlieb does a pretty good job putting Wittgenstein's character on display, including the different facets shown to different people. With some LW could be silly and chatty, even as his primary mode of intellectual work often involved imperious declarations. I especially liked the examinations of the Wittgenstein family and his romantic partners (mostly men), who were clearly important influences on his thought as well.
I felt that the text overall could have been better organized. Gottlieb at one point jumps back in the middle of introducing LW's family to describe several intellectual antecedents. The info is good, but it's so awkwardly placed that I was briefly flummoxed as I tried to determine if pages were missing from my copy. Similarly, the book pays loving attention to the earlier periods of LW's life (especially the gestation of the Tractatus), but the treatment of the last decade or so of his life was so rushed that I assumed we would be circling back with another chapter to cover Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty etc. Nope!
While I appreciate the brevity in our rushed Age of Airplanes (and the desire to hit a different market segment from tomes like Ray Monk's bio), this one could have been immensely improved with some additional material. I thought Gottlieb was sensitively attuned to what made LW tick, so I would have really enjoyed application of that psychological lens to elucidate the details of his later thought (especially because I believe LW's philosophy had significant therapeutic value, for him and maybe for others). Instead, this quickened to a hasty ending just when I wanted to slow down and savor. That said, this is a fantastic intro to a deep thinker for those short on time. It will leave you questioning just how much he was a tragic figure vs. his own assessment of having lived a wonderful life; perhaps that's a false dichotomy and we should simply see him as deeply humane. I know I do.
I felt that the text overall could have been better organized. Gottlieb at one point jumps back in the middle of introducing LW's family to describe several intellectual antecedents. The info is good, but it's so awkwardly placed that I was briefly flummoxed as I tried to determine if pages were missing from my copy. Similarly, the book pays loving attention to the earlier periods of LW's life (especially the gestation of the Tractatus), but the treatment of the last decade or so of his life was so rushed that I assumed we would be circling back with another chapter to cover Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty etc. Nope!
While I appreciate the brevity in our rushed Age of Airplanes (and the desire to hit a different market segment from tomes like Ray Monk's bio), this one could have been immensely improved with some additional material. I thought Gottlieb was sensitively attuned to what made LW tick, so I would have really enjoyed application of that psychological lens to elucidate the details of his later thought (especially because I believe LW's philosophy had significant therapeutic value, for him and maybe for others). Instead, this quickened to a hasty ending just when I wanted to slow down and savor. That said, this is a fantastic intro to a deep thinker for those short on time. It will leave you questioning just how much he was a tragic figure vs. his own assessment of having lived a wonderful life; perhaps that's a false dichotomy and we should simply see him as deeply humane. I know I do.
December 3, 2025
Over all a nice introduction to the life of Wittgenstein. If you're looking for a deep dive into his philosophy then you will be disappointed. If you want a general biography, then this book is for you. Wittgenstein's ideas are what fascinates me more than his life, hence the score. Again, its well written and full of information, just not what I wanted.
December 31, 2025
How do you write of the life of a man who was a sea urchin to those around him while remarkably vulnerable and open in his journaling? Gottlieb threads the needle well, balancing what we know of this enigmatic man with the always changing perspectives of his peers.
December 21, 2025
Splendid overview.
January 19, 2026
For as much as I appreciate Wittgenstein, the man and his philosophy always remains enigmatic to me. This short biography is lucid while not obfuscating the mystery.
January 20, 2026
A marvellous biography of a fascinating character!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews