Wittgenstein’s Rhinoceros

The adventures of a great philosopher in a world where “a rhinoceros might be lurking where you least expect it”.

After a debate with his teacher Bertrand Russell, young Ludwig Wittgenstein embarks on a mission to show that proving the absence of something—for example, the absence of a rhino in the Trinity College lecture hall—is much harder than proving its presence. In search of a rhinoceros, he travels to Iceland and Norway; visions of a rhino haunt him in the trenches of the First World War and on his secret mission to Soviet Russia. His long investigation will end in a rhino-philosophical treatise and the famous phrase “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”