Otto Weininger

Otto Weininger (1880–1903) was an Austrian philosopher who published one book and died at twenty-three. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, he studied philosophy and psychology at the university and converted to Protestantism on the day he received his doctorate in 1902. His dissertation, expanded as Sex and Character (1903), proposed that all human beings combine a masculine and a feminine principle and built on that idea a theory of genius, ethics and logic marked by hostility to women and to Judaism. Four months after it appeared he shot himself. The book became a sensation after his suicide and influenced Wittgenstein, Strindberg and Kafka among others.