Friedrich Waismann was born in Vienna in 1896 and lived there until the
time of the Anschluss in 1938. From then until his death in 1959 he
lived in England; this, apart from a brief period at Cambridge early on,
was almost wholly at Oxford, \ Vhere he held the posts, first, or
reader in the philosophy of mathematics and then of reader in the
philosophy of science. He was of Jewish descent -his father being
Russian, his mother German. He studied mathematics and physics at the
University of Vienna and attended the lec- tures of Hahn. Beginning his
career as a teacher of mathematics he soon be- came an unofficial
assistant to Moritz Schlick. It was Schlick's concern to see that the
new philosophical ideas developed by Wittgenstein from the time of his
return to philosophy in the later 1920s were made public that de-
termined the subsequent shape of Waismann's activities. Until the out-
break of the war in 1939 his main task was the preparation of a book in
which Wittgenstein's thought was to be systematically expounded. Be-
tween 1927 and 1935 this project was carried on in close personal
conjunc- tion with Wittgenstein. A first version of the planned book,
Logik. Sprache. Philosophie seems to have been completed by 1931. A very
differ- ent version came to England with Waismann in 1938. It finally
appeared, in an English translation, as Principles of Linguistic
Philosophy.