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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

One of my favourite positive doctoral viva stories was Wittgenstein, who presented "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" as his dissertation, which had already been published and was already considered a masterpiece. The report was something like "We consider the work of Mr Wittgenstein to be the work of a genius. Nevertheless, it fulfills the criteria for a Cambridge doctorate".

Edit to add: The actual quote (which I just found) was from G.E. Moore (Bertrand Russell was the other examiner): "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree."

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Very funny to me that on the way out of the room Wittgenstein allegedly "clapped the two examiners [Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore] on the shoulder and said, 'Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it.'"

That seems on-brand, if off-base, for Wittgenstein; so perhaps he did.

Probably because it was a bunch of nonsense. Wittgenstein has no place in the same sentence as Bertrand Russell.

"When Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was originally published—in German in 1921, and in English in 1922—Bertrand Russell was much better known. In fact, Wittgenstein relied on Russell to get his manuscript published in the first place, and it was Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus that encouraged publishers to consider accepting it at all. While Wittgenstein was grateful for Russell’s efforts, he was dismayed by his introduction, feeling that not even his former professor understood him. For Russell’s part, he was by this time exhausted by his relationship with the young Austrian who had been his student at Trinity in the years leading up to the First World War." [1]

[1] https://dearbertie.mcmaster.ca/letter/wittgenstein

Wittgenstein is generally considered to be one of most important philosophers of the 20th century, if not the most important. Analytic philosophy has largely lost interest in Russell's works (Kripke was far more important and is generally considered the person who "cleaned" a lot of Russell's deadend projects), while analytic and "continental" philosophy still avidly discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and the fallouts from that work were a profound reassessment and shake up of philosophy. Russell is probably more well known nowadays as a popularizer of certain ideas in philosophy, as a general interest and political writer, and as a philosopher that typified the particular era in which he wrote, and less so for the actual philosophical ideas he sought to argue for. His History of Western Philosophy book for instance is quite famously bad.

Most people today would question if Russell should be put in the same sentence as Wittgenstein.

Don’t worry, the reassessment which happened to Russell will undoubtedly befell Wittgenstein when the time has come. Both worked on the fairly uninteresting part of philosophy anyway.

Not based on the Tractatus, however. Which had it's moment but it contains some of the greatest boners ever written. The confusion of probability with simple logic trees is beyond hilarious from a modern perspective.

I found the book "The world as I found it" by Bruce Duffy to be a fairly good read on this subject.

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