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Portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein

1889–1951 · Austrian-British

Analytic philosophy; ordinary language philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a Viennese-born philosopher who worked at Cambridge and is often ranked the most important philosopher of the 20th century. His early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus held that language pictures the world and that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence; his later Philosophical Investigations rejected much of this, arguing that meaning lies in use within language-games.

How to spot them

  • ▸"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"; "The world is everything that is the case"
  • ▸Picture theory of meaning; language-games; family resemblance; meaning as use
  • ▸Beetle in a box; private language argument; duck-rabbit; showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle
  • ▸"Early" and "later" Wittgenstein; the poker incident with Popper

Key works

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

German original Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921), English 1922 with Russell's introduction; numbered propositions on logic, language and the world

Blue and Brown Books (1958)

Notes dictated to Cambridge students in 1933–35, bridging the early and later philosophy

Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Posthumous masterpiece (Philosophische Untersuchungen): meaning as use, language-games, family resemblance, rule-following, private language

On Certainty (1969)

Final notes, responding to G. E. Moore, on doubt, knowledge and the bedrock propositions we cannot coherently doubt

Key ideas

  • Picture theory (Tractatus): a meaningful proposition is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs
  • What cannot be said (ethics, aesthetics, the mystical) can only be shown; the Tractatus ends "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
  • Meaning as use (Investigations): for a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language
  • Language-games and forms of life: language is woven into varied, rule-governed human activities
  • Family resemblance: things called by one word (e.g. "games") need share no single common feature, only overlapping similarities
  • Private language argument: a language intelligible only to its single user is impossible, since meaning needs public criteria (illustrated by the beetle in a box)

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Vienna into one of the richest families in Austria-Hungary; he later gave away his inheritance
  • •Went to Cambridge in 1911 to study with Bertrand Russell
  • •Wrote much of the Tractatus while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and finished it as a prisoner of war in Italy
  • •Believing he had solved philosophy's problems, he became a primary school teacher in rural Austria in the 1920s
  • •Was awarded his Cambridge PhD in 1929 for the Tractatus, examined by Russell and G. E. Moore; succeeded Moore as professor in 1939
  • •In 1946 at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club he reportedly brandished a poker during a heated exchange with Karl Popper
  • •His last words were reportedly "Tell them I've had a wonderful life"
  • •Tractatus 5.6: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources