![]() Leavis, hearing him mention that he had grown up in a house with seven pianos, concluded that he must be related to Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who was the lifelong mistress of Franz Liszt. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s background was something of an enigma to his colleagues. It was, above all, the ways they suffered that made the Wittgensteins one. For as Alexander Waugh shows in The House of Wittgenstein, the resemblances that united the philosopher with his own family were more than just physical. So said Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Blue Book but none of the students who pored over that collection of lecture notes, which circulated samizdat -style in the Cambridge of the 1930s, could have guessed at the autobiographical bearing of Wittgenstein’s metaphor. ![]() Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking and these likenesses overlap. We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. From left, siblings Kurt, Paul, and Hermine Wittgenstein their brother-in-law, Max Salzer their mother, Leopoldine Wittgenstein Helene Wittgenstein Salzer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. ![]() The Wittgenstein family in Vienna, summer 1917. ![]()
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