Otto Weininger

Otto Weininger (1880 to 1903) was an Austrian philosopher who made his name with a single book, Sex and Character, published in 1903 when he was twenty-three. Born in Vienna to a Jewish goldsmith's family, he studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna, took his doctorate in 1902 and became a Protestant soon afterward. The book argues that every person mixes male and female elements, holds up genius as a masculine ideal and sets a Jewish character against a Christian one, passages that later writers, among them Nazi ideologists, drew on. Weininger shot himself in October 1903 in the house where Beethoven had died, and the suicide brought the book wide attention. His thought influenced Ludwig Wittgenstein and August Strindberg, and through his lesser-known work On the Last Things it reached James Joyce.