- Person
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Lived
- 1889–1951
- Field
- Logic & language
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, the son of the steel industrialist Karl Wittgenstein, one of the richest men in Europe. The family home was at the centre of the city's cultural life,, visited by musicians such as Brahms and Mahler. Three of his four grandparents were born Jewish, though the children were raised Roman Catholic. He studied mechanical engineering in Berlin and aeronautics in Manchester, before questions about the foundations of mathematics led him to Gottlob Frege and, on Frege's advice, to Cambridge in 1911 to study under Bertrand Russell.
When the First World War began he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, although he could have claimed a medical exemption. He served on the Russian and Italian fronts and was decorated for bravery. Through the war he kept notebooks, and in August 1918, while on leave, he completed the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Published in German in 1921 and in English in 1922 with an introduction by Russell, it applied modern logic to the relationship between the world, thought and language, and gave new insight into the nature of philosophy itself.
Believing he had solved philosophy's problems, he gave away his share of the family fortune and worked as a village schoolteacher in Lower Austria and helped design a house for his sister in Vienna. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, received his doctorate, and in 1939 succeeded G. E. Moore as professor of philosophy.
He also gave practical service. In 1941, finding it intolerable to teach philosophy while the Second World War raged, he took a job as a dispensary porter at Guy's Hospital in London, carrying medicines from the pharmacy to the wards, without telling the staff who he was. From 1943 to 1944 he worked as a laboratory assistant at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, on a research team studying wound shock, for four pounds a week.
Over these years he rejected much of his first book. His Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, two years after his death, asked readers to see language as a collection of "language games", each tied to how words are actually used, and argued that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Many philosophical puzzles, he argued, arise when words are cut off from their everyday use. A 1999 survey of American philosophy teachers ranked it the most important philosophy book of the 20th century, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that some consider him the greatest philosopher of that century.
Why it matters
Wittgenstein's ideas about meaning as use reshaped philosophy, linguistics and the study of mind, and still influence how scholars think about language, logic and ethics.
About Ludwig Wittgenstein
Vienna-born philosopher of Jewish descent whose Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations transformed how philosophers think about language, meaning and the limits of thought.
Sources
- Ludwig Wittgenstein Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Ludwig Wittgenstein Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.