"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)" — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus 1. The first time I met Wittgenstein, I was late. "The traffic was murder," I explained. He spent the next forty-five minutes analyzing this sentence. Then he was silent. I wondered why he had chosen a water tower for our meeting. I also wondered how I would leave, since the ladder I had used to climb up here had fallen to the ground. 2. Wittgenstein served as a machine-gunner in the Austrian Army in World War I. Before the war he studied logic in Cambridge with Bertrand Russell. Having inherited his father's fortune (iron and steel), he gave away his money, not to the poor, whom it would corrupt, but to relations so rich it would not thus affe...
de Cristina Fernandes e Rui Manuel Amaral