Place
Cambridge
The English university town where Bertrand Russell spent his career and where Wittgenstein arrived as his most troublesome student and eventually became the most important philosopher in the room.
Cambridge is England's second university city, but for the philosophy of the twentieth century it was the first. Bertrand Russell worked here for decades, and it was in Cambridge that he recognized Wittgenstein's genius and invited him to study. Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus elsewhere, but returned to Cambridge in 1929 to reconsider it, submitting it as his doctoral thesis with Russell and Moore as examiners. The Philosophical Investigations, the rethinking of everything he had built, was written here and published posthumously. G.E. Moore spent his career here. The tradition of analytic philosophy that Cambridge incubated went on to dominate the English-speaking world.
Thinkers Connected to Cambridge
Bertrand Russell
He spent the first half of his career inventing analytic philosophy and the second half annoying governments. Both projects lasted.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
He wrote two complete philosophies that contradict each other. Both became influential. He disowned the first while writing the second.
Thomas Kuhn
He showed that science does not advance by accumulation but by revolution, and that insight was itself a revolution.
A.N. Whitehead
He spent one career trying to derive all of mathematics from pure logic, and a second insisting that reality itself is made of events and relations rather than fixed, static things.
Elizabeth Anscombe
She argued that modern moral philosophy's talk of 'moral obligation' was a leftover from a divine-law framework almost nobody still believed in, and called for a return to Aristotle's ethics of character instead.