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by Tiziana Di Giovannandrea June 11, 2020 An autographed and signed letter from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed to the German philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, set a new world record for a logical-mathematical letter: it was sold and sold for 137,575 dollars at an online auction at the Bonhams auction house in New York.The 13-page letter, which Ludwig Wittgenstein (Vienna, 1889 - Cambridge, 1951) sent to the founder of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle Moritz Schlick (Berlin, 1882 - Vienna, 1936), speaks of the two incompleteness theorems demonstrated by Kurt Gödel in 1931.
The letter was written in 1935 when Wittgenstein was a professor at Trinity College of the University of Cambridge and reveals the thinker at the height of his philosophical genius. It is considered a central document in the philosophy of mathematics .
In the same online auction of the auction house on Madison Avenue in New York, specialized in rare and ancient books and manuscripts, a precious early Renaissance manuscript by the humanist writer Leonardo Bruni (Arezzo, 1370 - Florence, 1444) was sold. Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, awarded for $ 187,575.
It is the translation into vulgar Italian from Greek of two of the greatest dialogues of the philosopher Plato, "Fedone" and "Gorgia". It is Bruni's first manuscript that has been offered for auction in the past 50 years.
This collection of works by the great Greek philosopher Plato, translated and written around 1420 by the humanist scholar, includes Bruni's famous writing "Vita Ciceronis" and other important translations of Demosthenes and Aeschines, which represent meditations on death and morals and begin with Plato's arguments on the immortality of the soul from Socrates' point of view on his deathbed.