Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher whose work transformed 20th-century analytic philosophy. His 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written largely while he served in the First World War, set out a picture theory of language and concluded with the famous injunction that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. He spent the next decade away from professional philosophy before returning to Cambridge and developing a quite different later philosophy, posthumously published as the Philosophical Investigations, which examines language as a set of rule-governed activities embedded in forms of life. Both works have shaped subsequent philosophy of language, mind, and logic. He inherited one of the largest fortunes in Europe but gave it away and lived simply for most of his life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was the most influential philosopher of the twentieth-century analytic tradition. Born in Vienna to one of the wealthiest industrial families in the Habsburg empire, he studied engineering before turning to mathematical logic and philosophy, working with Russell at Cambridge before the First World War.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written largely in the trenches of the Italian front and published in 1921, is one of the most singular philosophical works of the century. Its numbered propositions argue that meaningful language pictures possible facts; that what cannot be said can only be shown; and that most of traditional philosophy attempts to say what can only be shown. Wittgenstein took himself to have solved the problems of philosophy and gave away his fortune, working as a village schoolteacher and then as a gardener before returning to philosophy at Cambridge in 1929.

The Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) marks Wittgenstein's break with the Tractatus. Meaning, on the later view, is not picturing but use within forms of life; the Tractatus's confidence in the picture theory of meaning is replaced by a therapeutic conception of philosophy as the dissolution of confusions arising from language. Wittgenstein's two philosophies — and the relation between them — have shaped analytic philosophy for a century.