Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (review)

What could have led Ludwig Wittgenstein to brandish a fireplace poker at Karl Popper during a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club on Friday, October 25, 1946? Indeed, did he actually "brandish" the poker, or merely pick it up absent-mindedly and use it to give emphasis to his own remarks, as he had during previous meetings of the Club? Who else was in attendance at the meeting, how were they affected by these events, and what sort of testimony would they (and the two main disputants themselves) give about the incident as time went by? What personal, as well as philosophical motivations induced Popper to present on this occasion a paper arguing that there are genuine philosophical problems, and not just language-based "puzzles" from which (according to the Wittgenstein of this period) it is the sole task of philosophy to help extricate us? How could two former compatriots, both men of Jewish descent hailing from Vienna, both having seen their homeland ravaged by Nazism and then the war, and both now naturalized British citizens teaching philosophy in their adopted country, arrive at such different conceptions of the scope and nature of their chosen field of inquiry? And what stake did Bertrand Russell, the person who admonished Wittgenstein (his one-time protégé-cum-tutelary genius) to put down the poker, have in this clash between two titans of twentieth-century philosophy, which had been shaped so profoundly by Russell's own contributions to the field?

Beginning in medias res with a bare outline of the poker-wielding incident, which was first brought to the attention of the authors by an exchange of letters published in 1998 in the Times Literary Supplement, Wittgenstein's Poker reads like intellectual history in the guise of a gripping detective novel—one of Wittgenstein's own favorite genres, as it turns out. Whetting readers' curiosity with their initial sketch of the two philosophers' quasi-violent confrontation, the authors then sleuth their way back through the first half of the twentieth-century, ferreting out the underlying causes of this remarkable dispute. Edmonds and Eidinow also trace their account forward in time, re-assessing the Popper-Wittgenstein contretemps in light of subsequent developments in cultural and intellectual history, and also vis-à-vis the later history of (analytic) philosophy as an academic discipline. Thus, in a stroke of historiographic brilliance, the authors use Wittgenstein's wielding of the poker as a focal event or pregnant moment, and then "fill in" the contexts surrounding this incident, to suggest the complex network of circumstances that conspired to bring it about and make it what it was. In other words—and in a way that harmonizes with the later Wittgenstein's own thinking—the authors' account suggests that the incident would not even be intelligible apart from the network of institutions, practices, and "language-games" in terms of which the event has taken on the identity that is still in the process of being imputed to it.

More than this, however, Wittgenstein's Poker is an absorbing, highly readable text combining intellectual history, biography, and nontechnical expositions of Wittgenstein's, Popper's, Russell's, and others' contributions to philosophical inquiry, as well as a searching meditation on the role of philosophy in modern and postmodern culture. One early chapter transports us back to the day of the meeting, surveys the members of the audience, and then outlines the life-histories of those present, including Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe, Stephen Toulmin, and the brilliant mathematician-philosopher George Kreisel. Although all were eyewitnesses to the wielding of the poker, these participants later gave conflicting accounts of who did (or said) what, when and in what order. Other chapters examine differences between Popper and Wittgenstein deriving from their quite different socioeconomic and familial backgrounds, explore the problematic relationship both philosophers had with...