On October 25, 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, the great
twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came
face to face for the first and only time. The meeting -- which lasted
ten minutes -- did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation
became the stuff of instant legend, but precisely what happened during
that brief confrontation remained for decades the subject of intense
disagreement.
An engaging mix of philosophy, history, biography, and literary
detection, Wittgenstein's Poker explores, through the
Popper/Wittgenstein confrontation, the history of philosophy in the
twentieth century. It evokes the tumult of fin-de-siécle Vienna,
Wittgentein's and Popper's birthplace; the tragedy of the Nazi takeover
of Austria; and postwar Cambridge University, with its eccentric set of
philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell. At the center of the story
stand the two giants of philosophy themselves -- proud, irascible,
larger than life -- and spoiling for a fight.