Introduction

This essay is a contribution to the study of the intellectual life of Vienna as it influenced the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Everyone who explores this territory (first marked out in 1973 by Stephen Toulmin and Allan Janik in Wittgenstein's Vienna) is obliged to repeat that Wittgenstein acknowledged deep debts to Viennese mentors, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and Otto Weininger, as well as to the obvious philosophers, Schopenhauer, Frege, and Russell, They then have to say that Weininger published an enlarged version of his doctoral thesis, as Sex and Character, at the age of twenty-three (in 1903), and a few months later shot himself. Sex and Character soon became notorious, not for author's dramatic demise or for what strikes us today as its antifeminism and anti-Semitism, but for its deep and systematic critique of Viennese modernism and for its embodiment of what struck fin-de-siècle Vienna as genius.

It was in Vienna, in 1977, that I discovered that Weininger had left behind essays and aphorisms and that these were posthumously published as a second book, titled Über die letzten Dinge. Unlike the first, which promptly appeared in English, the second volume, although it, too, sold well in German, was not translated into English. Over the years, mostly during subsequent sabbaticals, I would reread bits of that second book, and ponder what Wittgenstein had found so impressive in it. Finally, since no one else seemed to want to do so, I translated it.