Matthias Kross: Philosophical and Literary Imagination in Wittgenstein and Sterne. A Case Study

Abstract

The influence poets exerted on Wittgenstein's thinking is until today one of the neglected aspects of his writings. However, from the very start of his career as a philosophical writer, Wittgenstein himself insisted on the importance of the literary for his work: he described his Tractatus as strictly "philosophical and at the same time literary", and in his conversations and letters he refers to literary works probably more often than to philosophical authors. In my presentation, I want to illustrate the importance of literature for Wittgenstein's way of doing philosophy by the case study of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Sterne clearly was as much a philosophical poet as Wittgenstein was a poetic philosopher, and Wittgenstein claimed to have read the Shandy at least a dozen times.