Fin de siecle Vienna was once memorably described by Karl Kraus as a "proving ground for the destruction of the world". In the decades leading to the World War that brought down the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city was at once an operetta dream world masking social and political problems and tension, as well as a center for the far-reaching explorations and innovations in music, art, science, and philosophy that would help to define modernity. One of the most powerful critiques of the retreat into fantasy was that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early career in Vienna has helped frame debates about ethical and aesthetic values in culture. In Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Allan Janik expands upon his work Wittgenstein's Vienna (co-authored with Stephen Toulmin) to amplify a number of significant points concerning the genesis of Wittgenstein's thought, the nature of Viennese culture, and criticism of contemporary culture.

Introduction: How Not to View Vienna 1900; 1: The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer; 2: Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture; 3: Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism; 4: Ebner Contra Wagner: Epistemology, Aesthetics, and Salvation in Vienna, 1900; 5: Offenbach: Art between Monologue and Dialogue; 6: Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism; 7: Saying and Showing: Hertz and Wittgenstein; 8: Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View"; 9: Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language; 10: Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture; 11: Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method; 12: "Ethik und Ästhetik Sind Eins": Wittgenstein and Trakl