Ludwig Wittgenstein

Who is Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher born in Vienna into one of the wealthiest families of the Habsburg empire. He is regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, especially in logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. His early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus published in 1921, argued that language pictures reality and sought to define the limits of what can meaningfully be said. Believing he had resolved the central problems of philosophy, he withdrew from academic life for several years, working as a schoolteacher and architect, before returning to the University of Cambridge. His later philosophy, expressed in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, rejected much of his earlier thinking and introduced influential ideas such as language-games and the notion of meaning as use. He taught at Cambridge for much of his career and died there in 1951, leaving a profound legacy across analytic philosophy.

Sources: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921 · Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953 · Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 1990