Robert Calverley Trevelyan was born on 28 June 1872, the son of Sir George Trevelyan and his wife Caroline. After attending Harrow, Trevelyan was admitted to Trinity College on 15 June 1891. He graduated from Cambridge in 1894 with a BA and LLB, having take examinations in Classics Part I and Law Part II. Although his father wanted him to become a barrister, Trevelyan pursued a career as a poet. He published numerous works during his lifetime, many of them translations from ancient authors.
Trevelyan married the Dutch violinist Elizabeth des Amorie van der Hoeven. The artist Julian Trevelyan was their son.
Francis MacDonald Cornford was born at Eastbourne on 27 February 1874, son of The Revd James Cornford and Mary Emma MacDonald. He attended St Paul's School and was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge on 13 June 1893 and was elected a Scholar the following year. Cornford obtained firsts in both parts of the classical tripos in 1895 and 1897; he was awarded the Chancellor's Classical Medal in the latter year. In 1897 he applied for the Chair of Greek at Cardiff, but was unsuccessful. However, in 1899 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity. He was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the College in 1902 and Lecturer in 1904. In 1909 Cornford Married Frances Darwin, daughter of Ellen Crofts of Newnham College and the botanist Francis Darwin. Frances was to become a poet of note and as such an influence on their eldest son Rupert John (known simply as John), born in 1915. Three further children followed, Christopher Francis, born 1917, a son in 1921 and a daughter two years later. During WWI Cornford was a musketry instructor at Grantham and rose to the rank of Captain before transferring to the Ministry of Munitions.
In 1921 and 1928 Cornford was unsuccessfully a candidate for the Regius Chair of Greek. In 1927 he was appointed Brereton Reader in Classics and four years later became the first to hold the Laurence Chair in Ancient Philosophy, a post which he held until retirement in 1939. He was elected FBA in 1937.
Early in his academic career, Cornford became disenchanted with "Cambridge classics" with its emphasis on philology and published "The Cambridge Classical Course: an essay in anticipation of further reform". in 1903. He soon allied with like-minded persons such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray and A B Cook in a group that became known as the 'Cambridge Ritualists' who looked for the underlying thoughts and myths that underpinned classical Greece. A string of publications ensued: Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907), From Religion to Philosophy: a study in the origins of Western speculation" (1912), "The Origins of Attic Comedy" (1914), "Greek Religious thought from Homer to Alexander" (1923), The Laws of Motion in Ancient Thought (1931), Before and After Socrates (1931), Plato's Theory of Knowledge: the Theaetetus and Sophist of Plato (1935), Plato's Cosmology: the Timaeus of Plato (1937), Plato and Parmenides (1939). A series of essays, Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays* was published posthumously.
Cornford was also active politically on the Cambridge scene. In 1897 he organised a student petition in favour of degrees for women and in 1904 published an anonymous flysheet on the subject of compulsory chapel. To support rationalist moves in the University he joined with C K Ogden in founding the Heretics. His most famous excursion into University politics was Microcosmographia Academica, first published anonymously in 1908 and reissued many times since. In it he satirises the Cambridge system and the types of administrator that it produced. During WWI, when Bertrand Russell was deprived of his College lectureship, Cornford was one of the body of Fellows that attempted to get him reinstated.
Cornford died at his home, Conduit Head, on 3 January 1943.
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna, the son of Karl Wittgenstein, a wealthy steel industrialist. He studied at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg whence he moved in 1908 to the University of Manchester to study aeronautics where he designed a primitive jet-turbine engine. The mathematics required for his studies in engineering brought him to consider the philosophy of mathematics and to seek out Bertrand Russell at Trinity College Cambridge, with whom he studied, at first on an unofficial basis. In January 1912 he was admitted to Trinity where he spent five terms before moving to Skjolden in Norway, where he thought he might work on logic in peaceful surroundings.
At the outbreak of war, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian army, fighting on the Eastern and Southern fronts before he was captured by the Italians in 1918. During his incarceration, he was able to finish the work which was to become the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, later published in 1922. The war clearly had a profound effect on Wittgenstein, who, shortly after his release gave away the fortune that he had inherited from his father and resolved to lead a life of simplicity.
Wittgenstein now took up the career of schoolteacher, holding positions in a number of schools in Lower Austria, but he was not always sufficiently sensitive to the needs of the slower children. In 1926 he was forced to leave after hitting a young pupil, and he returned to Vienna to design a house for his sister.
In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge on the prompting of Frank Ramsey and in June received the degree of PhD, submitting the Tractatus as his dissertation. In the following year he was elected to a senior research fellowship of Trinity College, which he held for six years. At the same time he was a lecturer in the Moral Sciences faculty, during which time the Blue and Brown books were dictated to his pupils. In 1939 he succeeded G E Moore as Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy. During WWII he worked as a porter in Guy's hospital and as a laboratory assistant in a laboratory in Newcastle looking into shell shock. He returned to his duties in Cambridge at the end of the war, but resigned from his chair in 1947. In 1948 and 49 he lived in Ireland but returned to England, dying in Cambridge in 1951.