Wittgenstein's hut
pp. 79-100
in: Michael A. Peters, Jeff Stickney (eds), A companion to Wittgenstein on education, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
This is a reflection on Wittgenstein's life by way of a journey to find Wittgenstein's hut in Norway in 2004. The journey weaves together Wittgenstein's notebooks, his biographical relationships with others, and the journey toward, across, and away from the physical terrain around the hut. I try to recover the connection between the two central injunctions of a philosophical life: the Delphic maxim that we should know ourselves, and the Socratic advice that we should take care of ourselves. I consider implicitly how these two philosophical injunctions played out in Wittgenstein's life, the ways he tried to answer them, the ways in which he failed, succeeded, and above all learned about this relationship, and what can be recovered from this experience for us today.
