On 25th October 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face to face for the first and only time. The meeting was a disaster, their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of legend.

Wittgenstein’s Poker is a mini biography of the lives of Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein leading up to this one and only meeting at the Cambridge moral science club in October 1946. What happened? Why did the two great philosophers behave as they did? What did Popper have against Wittgenstein?

At stake was the meaning and direction of the analytic revolution–which had been led by Bertrand Russell –and, ultimately, the purpose of philosophy itself.