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Life
German-born philosopher; of wealthy family; settled at Cambridge; passed some time in Ireland, 1948-49; plaque at Park Gate, Dublin; his sojourn at Rossroe, Connemara, is the subject of poems by Richard Murphy and others.
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Commentary
Luke Gibbons, review of Richard Wall, Wittgenstein in Ireland (Martin Chambers/Reaktion Bks. 2000), 160pp., in The Irish Times, 13 Jan. 2001; ‘Silence and its hinterland was the undiscovered country beyond language and it may have been this which drew Wittgenstein to the glens of Wicklow and to the desolate landscape of Killary Harbour in Connemare on several ocasions in the 1930s and 1940s.’ Invited to Rosro[e] Cottage, Killary, by his Cambridge student and friend Maurice O’Connor Drury, whom he encourage to train in medicine rather than philosophy, and who was later appt. to St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin; quotes lines by Richard Murphy: ‘He broke prisons, beginning with words, / At last tamed, by talking birds’; close friend of George Thomson, Gaelic scholar; lived at Rosroe, April-Oct. 1948; left Ireland in late 1949 and died in 1951 in the home of a friend of Drury’s.
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