David Edmonds is an award-winning journalists with the BBC. This book, his first, has been translated into more
than a dozen languages.
Summary
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.
