Wittgenstein’s Poker is a ‘serious’ treatment of ‘a ten-minute argument between two great philosophers’ . This is how the book is described itself on its cover by English authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow.
After the first chapter I already saw it as having features of a detective story. The meeting, which is presented as a critical incident, is described with evidence from interviews with the surviving witnesses.
Readers are taken through the unfolding investigations into the background of the two main characters, two of the era’s most illustrious Austrians, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, at a time shortly after the defeat and death of their even more famous countryman Adolf Hitler.
Their monumental confrontation took place in a crumbling committee room in King’s College, Cambridge, in October 1946. Popper, a visiting speaker possibly encouraged by celebrity philosopher Bertrand Russell, had arrived with his intention of demolishing the theories of the home favourite Wittgenstein. The verbal battle deteriorated into a possible assault as Wittgenstein seized a fireside poker and wielded it threatening at Popper before stalking out of the room. Curiously the location of the weapon, the famous poker, remains a mystery to this day.
