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?