Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, was born in Vienna in April, 1889, the youngest of eight children. While the house of Wittgenstein had been prominent in Austria since the early nineteenth century, Ludwig’s father, Karl, an engineer, moved it from prominence to great riches with his brilliant manipulations of the steel industry. When he died, in 1913, The Times of London eulogized him as “The Carnegie of Austria.” Though the Wittgensteins were of Jewish ancestry—a fact that Ludwig would later take considerable pains to conceal—they had been Protestant for two generations. His mother, Leopoldine, was Roman Catholic and Ludwig, like his brothers and sisters, was baptized Catholic. Though there are good reasons to describe his Weltanschauung as fundamentally religious—Bertrand Russell went so far on one occasion as to call him “a complete mystic” (“mystic” being a term of derision for Russell)—Wittgenstein was not a church-goer and seems to have had little sympathy with what has come to be called “organized religion.”

In many respects, the Wittgensteins were the very embodiment of Viennese haut bourgeois sensibility and patrician splendor. In the first volume of his new biography of the philosopher, Brian McGuinness, a longtime student of Wittgenstein’s thought and a Fellow at Queen’s College, Oxford, even employs the adjective wittgensteinisch to describe that combination of concentration, largesse, and nervous self-absorption that seemed to define the family.¹ Though he later affected a spartan simplicity that bordered on the comical, Ludwig grew up