PEIRCE TO STRAWSON baptized as Catholics The family was also highly artistic; Johannes Brahms was a frequent guest, and Ludwig’s brother Paul was a concert pianist who achieved international fame in spite of losing an arm in the 1914–18 war Ludwig was educated at home until he was fourteen, after which he attended for three years the Realschule at Linz Among his schoolboy contemporaries was Adolf Hitler At school Wittgenstein, partly under the influence of Schopenhauer, ceased to be a religious believer He studied engineering in Berlin, and later at the University of Manchester, where he designed a jet-reaction engine for aircraft He read Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and through it became acquainted with the work of Frege, whom he visited at Jena in 1911 On Frege’s advice he went to Cambridge, and spent five terms at Trinity College, studying under Russell, who quickly recognized and generously fostered his genius Wittgenstein left Cambridge in 1913 and went to live as a solitary in a hut he had built himself in Norway The notes and letters he wrote at this period exhibit the germination of the view of philosophy he was to retain throughout his life Philosophy, he wrote, was not a deductive discipline; it could not be placed on the same footing as the natural sciences ‘Philosophy gives no pictures of reality and can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigations’ (NB 93) When war broke out in 1914 Wittgenstein enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian artillery, and served with conspicuous courage on the eastern and Italian fronts He was captured by Italian soldiers in the southern Tyrol in November 1918 and sent to a prison camp near Monte Cassino During his military service he had written philosophical thoughts into his diary, and during his imprisonment he turned them into the only philosophical book that he published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus He sent this book from the prison camp to Russell, with whom he was later able to discuss it in Holland It was published in German in 1921 and shortly afterwards in England with an English translation by C K Ogden and an introduction by Russell The Tractatus is short, beautiful, and cryptic It consists of a series of numbered paragraphs, often very brief The first is ‘The world is all that is the case’ and the last is ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ The key theme of the book is the picture theory of meaning Language, we are told, consists of propositions that picture the world 55