Wittgenstein's Poker

Edmonds, David and Eidinow, John. Wittgenstein's Poker -- The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. HarperCollins, First paperback edition 2002.

pp. 16. "Don't try and shit higher than your arse," which Wittgenstein applied to philosophers like Popper who thought they could change the world

pp. 33. "To learn from Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of expression and catchwords and even to imitate his tone of voice, his mien and gestures was almost impossible.

pp. 35. This demonstrated to Wittgenstein that what was impermissible in language was much more subtle than he had previously believed -- that there was more to commonsense logic than the formal logic practiced by logicians

pp. 40. Popper's debt was small, though he felt imense gratitude. Wittgenstein's debt was immense, but by 1946 he felt for Russell only barely concealed contempt.

pp. 61. In Principia Ethica, Moore argues that the "good" in ethics is essentially indefinable -- rather like the color yellow. "Good is good," he wrote, "and that is the end of the matter." He gave the label "The Naturalistic Fallacy" to the mistake of trying to express goodness in other ways... One cannot logically move from a description of a state of affairs ("There are people starving in Burundi") to a moral judgment ("We should send them food"): the one does not logically follow from the other

pp. 69. Like many of Wittgenstein's followers, however, he walked a tightrope between admiration and fear, attempting to please but at the same time not to presume.

pp. 97. Ye, as the end of the 1930s was to reveal, the whole social edifice was built on the thinnest of Austrian ice.

pp. 117. ..[T]he compulsion to dig down to rock bottom and rebuild from there...

pp. 119. He told them, "As Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German nation, I now report to history that my homeland has joined the German Reich."