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In mid-August, I traveled to the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, held in the village of Kirchberg am Wechsel. The conference is held in the village grade school, noteworthy for the gym on its top floor – a large hall with peaked roof, floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows opening out onto the Alps, and bars, ladders, ropes, and rings for the children. It was in this room that we adults crowded for the plenary lectures (sweating in the European heat wave), while other, less notable speakers met in the smaller but cooler classrooms on the lower floors. Kirchberg is neighbor to Trattenbach, the town in which Wittgenstein retired to teach school children, satisfied that he had cleaned up the problems of philosophy. Perhaps he taught them in a school not unlike that in Kirchberg; a bus trip to Trattenbach – which I missed – allows one to learn more. But Kirchberg itself was quite revealing: bread, butter, cheese, sausage (i.e. franks) and beer; a culturally ingrained Catholicism; a pronounced, lilting accent: it made sense of Wittgenstein to me (no pun intended), or at least why he would wish to retire there. As for the conference itself, only about a sixth of the hundred papers presented during the week-long conference were devoted to Wittgenstein, the others addressing the general theme of the year, knowledge and belief. Patrick Suppes spoke on Bayesian Epistemology, Robert Audi on Philosophy of Religion, Crispin Wright on Skepticism, Certainty, Moore, and Wittgenstein, Hans-Johann Glock on Wittgenstein on Truth, and Michael Heller on whether the universe can explain itself! For the most part, I attended papers on Wittgenstein, many of them quite good, and to my relief, most of them in English. Two on the Tractatus that especially stood out were Daniéle-Moyal-Sharrock’s on nonsense and Maija Aalto’s on sense and substance.
I was on a budget; the taxis from my Gasthaus high in the Alps to the valley and village of Kirchberg were expensive; the highlight of the trip for me was an early morning meal of bread and butter (like the lunch Wittgenstein is said to have eaten in his 40s, with chocolate), and a long hour and a half hike down breathtaking hills to the village and conference below. A summer slide (like a luge, but not one) winds down the mountain, and a summer lift (like a ski-lift, but not one) runs up it; walking down the mountain I would sometimes have day trippers passing above, their feet dangling only yards from my head. – Rosalind Carey
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