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Ludwig Wittgenstein

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophers

   Western Philosophy
   20th-century philosophy
   Ludwig Wittgenstein
   Name: Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
   Birth: 1889 April 26 (Vienna, Austria)
   Death: 1951 April 29 (Cambridge, England)
   School/tradition: Analytic philosophy, though the New School for Social
   Research is using him in dialogue with Continental philosophy
   Main interests: Metaphysics, Epistemology, logic, philosophy of
   language, philosophy of mathematics
   Notable ideas: The structure of reality determines the structure of
   language {early}, Meaning is determined by use, in the context of a
   "language-game" {later}
   Influences: Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Moore,
   Weininger
   Influenced: Russell, Anscombe, Kripke, Rorty, Frank P. Ramsey, Dennett,
   von Wright, Wright

   Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( IPA: ['luːtvɪç 'joːzɛf 'joːhan
   'vɪtgənʃtaɪn]) ( April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) was an Austrian
   philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking works to
   contemporary philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic, the
   philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the
   philosophy of mind. He is widely regarded as one of the most
   influential philosophers of the 20th century.

Life

   Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on April 26, 1889, to Karl and
   Leopoldine Wittgenstein. He was the youngest of eight children, born
   into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the
   Austro-Hungarian empire. His father's parents, Hermann Christian and
   Fanny Wittgenstein, were born into Jewish families but later converted
   to Protestantism, and after they moved from Saxony to Vienna in the
   1850s, assimilated themselves into the Viennese Protestant professional
   classes. Ludwig's father, Karl Wittgenstein, became an industrialist,
   and went on to make a fortune in iron and steel. Ludwig's mother
   Leopoldine, born Kalmus, was also of Jewish descent on her father's
   side, but had been brought up as a practising Roman Catholic. Ludwig,
   like all his brothers and sisters, was baptized as a Roman Catholic and
   was given a Roman Catholic burial by his friends upon his death.

Early life

   Wittgenstein and Hitler in school photograph taken at the Linz
   Realschule in 1903.
   Enlarge
   Wittgenstein and Hitler in school photograph taken at the Linz
   Realschule in 1903.

   Ludwig grew up in a household that provided an exceptionally intense
   environment for artistic and intellectual achievement. His parents were
   both very musical and all their children were artistically and
   intellectually gifted. Karl Wittgenstein was a leading patron of the
   arts, and the Wittgenstein house hosted many figures of high culture —
   above all, musicians. The family was often visited by artists such as
   Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. Ludwig's older brother Paul
   Wittgenstein went on to become a world-famous concert pianist, even
   after losing his right arm in World War I. Ludwig himself did not have
   prodigious musical talent, but nonetheless had perfect pitch and his
   devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life
   — he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his
   philosophical writings, and was said to be unusually adept at whistling
   lengthy and detailed musical passages. He also played the clarinet and
   is said to have remarked that he approved of this instrument because it
   took a proper role in the orchestra.

   His family also had a history of intense self-criticism, to the point
   of depression and suicidal tendencies. Three of his four brothers
   committed suicide. The eldest of the brothers, Hans — a musical prodigy
   who started composing at age four — killed himself in April 1902, in
   Havana, Cuba. The third son, Rudolf, followed in May 1904 in Berlin.
   Their brother Kurt shot himself at the end of World War I, in October
   1918, when the Austrian troops he was commanding deserted en masse.

   Until 1903, Ludwig was educated at home; after that, he began three
   years of schooling at the Realschule in Linz, a school emphasizing
   technical topics. Adolf Hitler was a student there at the same time,
   when both boys were 14 or 15 years old. Ludwig was interested in
   physics and wanted to study with Ludwig Boltzmann, whose collection of
   popular writings, including an inspiring essay about the hero and
   genius who would solve the problem of heavier-than-air flight ("On
   Aeronautics") was published during this time (1905). Boltzmann
   committed suicide in 1906, however.

   In 1906, Wittgenstein began studying mechanical engineering in Berlin,
   and in 1908 he went to the Victoria University of Manchester to study
   for his doctorate in engineering, full of plans for aeronautical
   projects. He registered as a research student in an engineering
   laboratory, where he conducted research on the behaviour of kites in
   the upper atmosphere, and worked on the design of a propeller with
   small jet engines on the end of its blades. During his research in
   Manchester, he became interested in the foundations of mathematics,
   particularly after reading Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics
   and Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze. In the summer of 1911, Wittgenstein
   visited Frege, after having corresponded with him for some time, and
   Frege advised him to go to the University of Cambridge to study under
   Russell.

   In October 1911, Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in
   Trinity College, and was soon attending his lectures and discussing
   philosophy with him at great length. He made a great impression on
   Russell and G. E. Moore and started to work on the foundations of logic
   and mathematical logic. Russell was increasingly tired of philosophy,
   and saw Wittgenstein as a successor who would carry on his work. During
   this period, Wittgenstein's other major interests were music and
   travelling, often in the company of David Pinsent, an undergraduate who
   became a firm friend. He was also invited to join the elite secret
   society, the Cambridge Apostles, which Russell and Moore had both
   belonged to as students.

   In 1913, Wittgenstein inherited a great fortune when his father died.
   He donated some of it, initially anonymously, to Austrian artists and
   writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. In 1914 he went
   to visit Trakl when the latter wanted to meet his benefactor, but Trakl
   killed himself days before Wittgenstein arrived.

   Although he was invigorated by his study in Cambridge and his
   conversations with Russell, Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not
   get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by
   other academics. In 1913, he retreated to the relative solitude of the
   remote village of Skjolden at the bottom of the Sognefjord Norway. Here
   he rented the second floor of a house and stayed for the winter. The
   isolation from academia allowed him to devote himself entirely to his
   work, and he later saw this period as one of the most passionate and
   productive times of his life. While there, he wrote a ground-breaking
   work in the foundations of logic, a book entitled Logik, which was the
   immediate predecessor and source of much of the Tractatus
   Logico-Philosophicus.

World War I

   The outbreak of World War I in the next year took him completely by
   surprise, as he was living a secluded life at the time. He volunteered
   for the Austro-Hungarian army as a private soldier, first serving on a
   ship and then in an artillery workshop. In 1916, he was sent as a
   member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won
   several medals for bravery. The diary entries of this time reflect his
   contempt for the baseness, as he saw it, of his fellow soldiers.
   Throughout the war, Wittgenstein kept notebooks in which he frequently
   wrote philosophical and religious reflections alongside personal
   remarks. The notebooks reflect a profound change in his religious life:
   a militant atheist during his stint at Cambridge, Wittgenstein
   discovered Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Galicia.
   He devoured Tolstoy's commentary and became an evangelist of sorts; he
   carried the book everywhere he went and recommended it to anyone in
   distress (to the point that he became known to his fellow soldiers as
   "the man with the gospels"). Although Monk notes that Wittgenstein
   began to doubt by at least 1937, and that by the end of his life he
   said he could not believe Christian doctrines (although religious
   belief remained an important preoccupation), this is not contrary to
   the influence that Tolstoy had on his philosophy. Wittgenstein's other
   religious influences include Saint Augustine, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and
   most notably Søren Kierkegaard, whom Wittgenstein referred to as "a
   saint".

Developing the Tractatus

   Wittgenstein's work on Logik began to take on an ethical and religious
   significance. With this new concern with the ethical, combined with his
   earlier interest in logical analysis, and with key insights developed
   during the war (such as the so-called " picture theory" of
   propositions), Wittgenstein's work from Cambridge and Norway was
   transfigured into the material that eventually became the Tractatus. In
   1918, toward the end of the war, Wittgenstein was promoted to reserve
   officer (lieutenant) and sent to northern Italy as part of an artillery
   regiment. On leave in the summer of 1918, he received a letter from
   David Pinsent's mother telling Wittgenstein that her son had been
   killed in an airplane accident. Suicidal, Wittgenstein went to stay
   with his uncle Paul, and completed the Tractatus, which was dedicated
   to Pinsent. In a letter to Mrs Pinsent, Wittgenstein said "only in him
   did I find a real friend". The book was sent to publishers at this
   time, without success.

   In October, Wittgenstein returned to Italy and was captured by the
   Italians. Through the intervention of his Cambridge friends (Russell,
   Keynes and Pinsent had corresponded with him throughout the war, via
   Switzerland), Wittgenstein managed to get access to books, prepare his
   manuscript, and send it back to England. Russell recognized it as a
   work of supreme philosophical importance, and after Wittgenstein's
   release in 1919, he worked with Wittgenstein to get it published. An
   English translation was prepared, first by Frank P. Ramsey and then by
   C. K. Ogden, with Wittgenstein's involvement. After some discussion of
   how best to translate the title, G. E. Moore suggested Tractatus
   Logico-Philosophicus, in an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus
   Theologico-Politicus. Russell wrote an introduction, lending the book
   his reputation as one of the foremost philosophers in the world.

   However, difficulties remained. Wittgenstein had become personally
   disaffected with Russell, and he was displeased with Russell's
   introduction, which he thought evinced fundamental misunderstandings of
   the Tractatus. Wittgenstein grew frustrated as interested publishers
   proved difficult to find. To add insult to injury, those publishers who
   were interested proved to be so mainly because of Russell's
   introduction. At last, Wittgenstein found publishers in Wilhelm
   Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, which printed a German
   edition in 1921, and in Routledge Kegan Paul, which printed a bilingual
   edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation in
   1922.

The "lost years": life after the Tractatus

   At the same time, Wittgenstein was a profoundly changed man. He had
   embraced the Christianity that he had previously opposed, faced
   harrowing combat in World War I, and crystallized his intellectual and
   emotional upheavals with the exhausting composition of the Tractatus.
   It was a work which transfigured all of his past work on logic into a
   radically new framework that he believed offered a definitive solution
   to all the problems of philosophy. These changes in Wittgenstein's
   inner and outer life left him both haunted and yet invigorated to
   follow a new, ascetic life. One of the most dramatic expressions of
   this change was his decision in 1919 to give away his portion of the
   family fortune that he had inherited when his father had died. The
   money was divided between his sisters Helene and Hermine and his
   brother Paul, and Wittgenstein insisted that they promise never to give
   it back. He felt that giving money to the poor could only corrupt them
   further, whereas the rich would not be harmed by it.

   Since Wittgenstein thought that the Tractatus had solved all the
   problems of philosophy, he left philosophy and returned to Austria to
   train as a primary school teacher. He was educated in the methods of
   the Austrian School Reform Movement which advocated the stimulation of
   the natural curiosity of children and their development as independent
   thinkers, instead of just letting them memorize facts. Wittgenstein was
   enthusiastic about these ideas but ran into problems when he was
   appointed as an elementary teacher in the rural Austrian villages of
   Trattenbach, Puchberg-am-Schneeberg, and Otterthal. During his time as
   a schoolteacher, Wittgenstein wrote a pronunciation and spelling
   dictionary for his use in teaching students; it was published and
   well-received by his colleagues. This would be the only book besides
   the Tractatus that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime.

   Wittgenstein had unrealistic expectations of the rural children he
   taught, and his teaching methods were intense and exacting - he had
   little patience with those children who had no aptitude for
   mathematics. However, he achieved good results with children attuned to
   his interests and style of teaching, especially boys. His severe
   disciplinary methods (often involving corporal punishment) — as well as
   a general suspicion amongst the villagers that he was somewhat mad —
   led to a long series of bitter disagreements with some of his students'
   parents, and eventually culminated in April 1926 in the collapse of an
   eleven year old boy whom Wittgenstein had struck on the head. The boy's
   father attempted to have Wittgenstein arrested, and despite being
   cleared of misconduct he resigned his position and returned to Vienna,
   feeling that he had failed as a school teacher.

   After abandoning his work as a school teacher, Wittgenstein worked as a
   gardener's assistant in a monastery near Vienna. He considered becoming
   a monk, and went so far as to inquire about the requirements for
   joining an order. However, at the interview he was advised that he
   could not find in monastic life what he sought.

   Two major developments helped to save Wittgenstein from this despairing
   state. The first was an invitation from his sister Margaret ("Gretl")
   Stonborough (who was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1905) to work on the
   design and construction of her new house. He worked with the architect,
   Paul Engelmann (who had become a close friend of Wittgenstein's during
   the war), and the two designed a spare modernist house after the style
   of Adolf Loos (whom they both greatly admired). Wittgenstein found the
   work intellectually absorbing, and exhausting — he poured himself into
   the design in painstaking detail, including even small aspects such as
   doorknobs and radiators (which had to be exactly positioned to maintain
   the symmetry of the rooms). As a work of modernist architecture the
   house evoked some high praise; G. H. von Wright said that it possessed
   the same "static beauty" as the Tractatus. The effort of totally
   involving himself in intellectual work once again did much to restore
   Wittgenstein's spirits.

   Secondly, toward the end of his work on the house, Wittgenstein was
   contacted by Moritz Schlick, one of the leading figures of the newly
   formed Vienna Circle. The Tractatus had been tremendously influential
   to the development of the Vienna positivism, and although Schlick never
   succeeded in drawing Wittgenstein into the discussions of the Vienna
   Circle itself, he and some of his fellow circle members (especially
   Friedrich Waismann) met occasionally with Wittgenstein to discuss
   philosophical topics. Wittgenstein was frequently frustrated by these
   meetings — he believed that Schlick and his colleagues had
   fundamentally misunderstood the Tractatus, and at times would refuse to
   talk about it at all. (Much of the disagreements concerned the
   importance of religious life and the mystical; Wittgenstein considered
   these matters of a sort of wordless faith, whereas the positivists
   disdained them as useless. In one meeting, Wittgenstein refused to
   discuss the Tractatus at all, and sat with his back to his guests while
   he read aloud from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.) Nevertheless,
   the contact with the Vienna Circle stimulated Wittgenstein
   intellectually and revived his interest in philosophy. He also met with
   Frank P. Ramsey, a young philosopher of mathematics who travelled
   several times from Cambridge to Austria to meet with Wittgenstein and
   the Vienna Circle. In the course of his conversations with the Vienna
   Circle and with Ramsey, Wittgenstein began to think that there might be
   some "grave mistakes" in his work as presented in the Tractatus —
   marking the beginning of a second career of ground-breaking
   philosophical work, which would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Returning to Cambridge

   In 1929 he decided, at the urging of Ramsey and others, to return to
   Cambridge. He was met at the train station by a crowd of England's
   greatest intellectuals, discovering rather to his horror that he was
   one of the most famed philosophers in the world. In a letter to his
   wife, Lydia Lopokova, Lord Keynes wrote: "Well, God has arrived. I met
   him on the 5.15 train."

   Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge, as he did
   not have a degree, so he applied as an advanced undergraduate. Russell
   noted that his previous residency was in fact sufficient for a doctoral
   degree, and urged him to offer the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis,
   which he did in 1929. It was examined by Russell and Moore; at the end
   of the thesis defence, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the
   shoulder and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it."
   (Monk 271) Moore commented in the examiner's report: "In my opinion
   this is a work of genius; it is, in any case, up to the standards of a
   degree from Cambridge." Wittgenstein was appointed as a lecturer and
   was made a fellow of Trinity College.

   Although Wittgenstein was involved in a relationship with Marguerite
   Respinger (a young Swiss woman he had met as a friend of the family),
   his plans to marry her were broken off in 1931, and he never married.
   Most of his romantic attachments were to young men. There is
   considerable debate over how active Wittgenstein's homosexual life
   was--inspired by W. W. Bartley's claim to have found evidence of not
   only active homosexuality but in particular several casual liaisons
   with young men in the Wiener Prater park during his time in Vienna.
   Bartley published his claims in a biography of Wittgenstein in 1973,
   claiming to have his information from "confidential reports from...
   friends" of Wittgenstein (Bartley 160), whom he declined to name, and
   to have discovered two coded notebooks unknown to Wittgenstein's
   executors that detailed the visits to the Prater. Wittgenstein's estate
   and other biographers have disputed Bartley's claims and asked him to
   produce the sources that he claims. What has become clear, in any case,
   is that Wittgenstein had several long-term homoerotic attachments,
   including an infatuation with his friend David Pinsent and long-term
   relationships during his years in Cambridge with Francis Skinner and
   possibly Ben Richards.

   Wittgenstein's political sympathies lay on the left, and while he was
   opposed to Marxist theory, he described himself as a "communist at
   heart" and romanticized the life of labourers. In 1934, attracted by
   Keynes' description of Soviet life in Short View of Russia, he
   conceived the idea of emigrating to the Soviet Union with Skinner. They
   took lessons in Russian and in 1935 Wittgenstein travelled to Leningrad
   and Moscow in an attempt to secure employment. He was offered teaching
   positions but preferred manual work and returned three weeks later.

   From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, leaving Skinner
   behind. He worked on the Philosophical Investigations. In the winter of
   1936/37, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most
   of them about minor infractions like white lies, in an effort to
   cleanse himself. In 1938 he travelled to Ireland to visit Maurice
   Drury, a friend who was training as a doctor, and considered such
   training himself, with the intention of abandoning philosophy for
   psychiatry. He travelled to Ireland at the invitation of the then Irish
   Prime Minister, Mr. Eamon de Valera, himself a mathematics teacher. De
   Valera hoped that Wittgenstein's presence would contribute to an
   academy for advanced mathematics. Whilst staying in Ireland
   Wittgenstein resided at the Ashling hotel, now commemorated by a plaque
   in his honour.

   While in Ireland, the Anschluss took place. Wittgenstein was now
   technically a German citizen, and a Jew under the German racial laws.
   While he found this intolerable, and started to investigate the
   possibilities of acquiring British or Irish citizenship (with the help
   of Keynes), it put his siblings Hermine, Helene and Paul (all still
   residing in Austria) in considerable danger. Wittgenstein's first
   thought was to travel to Vienna, but he was dissuaded by friends. Had
   the Wittgensteins been classified as Jews, their fate would have been
   no different from that of any other Austrian Jews (of approximately 600
   in Linz at the end of the 1930s, for example, only 26 survived the
   war). Their only hope was to be classified as Mischlinge – officially,
   Aryan/Jewish mongrels, whose treatment, while harsh, was less brutal
   than that reserved for Jews. This reclassification was known as a
   "Befreiung". The successful conclusion of these negotiations required
   the personal approval of Adolf Hitler. "The figures show how difficult
   it was to gain a Befreiung. In 1939 there were 2,100 applications for a
   different racial classification: the Führer allowed only twelve."

   Gretl (an American citizen by marriage) started negotiations with the
   Nazi authorities over the racial status of their grandfather Hermann,
   claiming that he was the illegitimate son of an "Aryan". Since the
   Reichsbank was keen to get its hands on the large amounts of foreign
   currency owned by the Wittgenstein family, this was used as a
   bargaining tool. Paul, who had escaped to Switzerland and then the
   United States in July 1938, disagreed with the family's stance. After
   G. E. Moore's resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein, who was by then
   considered a philosophical genius, was appointed to the chair in
   Philosophy at Cambridge. He acquired British citizenship soon
   afterwards, and in July 1939 he travelled to Vienna to assist Gretl and
   his other sisters, visiting Berlin for one day to meet with an official
   of the Reichsbank. After this, he travelled to New York to persuade
   Paul (whose agreement was required) to back the scheme. The required
   Befreiung was granted in August 1939. The amount signed over to the
   Nazis by the Wittgenstein family, a week or so before the outbreak of
   war, was 1.7 tonnes of gold.

   After exhausting philosophical work, Wittgenstein would often relax by
   watching an American western (preferring to sit at the very front of
   the theatre) or reading detective stories. These tastes are in stark
   contrast to his preferences in music, where he rejected anything after
   Brahms as a symptom of the decay of society.

   By this time, Wittgenstein's view on the foundations of mathematics had
   changed considerably. Earlier, he had thought that logic could provide
   a solid foundation, and he had even considered updating Russell and
   Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Now he denied that there were any
   mathematical facts to be discovered and he denied that mathematical
   statements were "true" in any real sense: they simply expressed the
   conventional established meanings of certain symbols. He also denied
   that a contradiction should count as a fatal flaw of a mathematical
   system. He gave a series of lectures which may have been attended by
   Alan Turing and there are unsupported claims that the two vigorously
   discussed these matters.

   During World War II he left Cambridge and volunteered as a hospital
   porter in Guy's Hospital in London and as a laboratory assistant in
   Newcastle upon Tyne's Royal Victoria Infirmary. This was arranged by
   his friend John Ryle, a brother of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who
   was then working at the hospital. After the war, Wittgenstein returned
   to teach at Cambridge, but he found teaching an increasing burden: he
   had never liked the intellectual atmosphere at Cambridge, and in fact
   encouraged several of his students (including Skinner) to find work
   outside of academic philosophy. (There are stories, perhaps apocryphal,
   that if any of his philosophy students expressed an interest in
   pursuing the subject, he would ban them from attending any more of his
   classes.)

Final years

   "Today there were 18 1p coins on the grave of Ludwig Wittgenstein at
   the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. Originally —
   some days ago — there were four, spread about; and then five in a
   little pile to one side. This morning there were 15 neatly underlining
   his name. Now there are three more, still neatly lined up. Over the
   years numerous small objects have been placed on the grave including a
   lemon, a pork pie, a Mr Kipling cupcake and a Buddhist prayer wheel. It
   is all very intriguing." (Letter to the editor from Nick Ingham, The
   Times, September 3, 2001)
   Enlarge
   "Today there were 18 1p coins on the grave of Ludwig Wittgenstein at
   the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. Originally —
   some days ago — there were four, spread about; and then five in a
   little pile to one side. This morning there were 15 neatly underlining
   his name. Now there are three more, still neatly lined up. Over the
   years numerous small objects have been placed on the grave including a
   lemon, a pork pie, a Mr Kipling cupcake and a Buddhist prayer wheel. It
   is all very intriguing." (Letter to the editor from Nick Ingham, The
   Times, September 3, 2001)

   Wittgenstein resigned his position at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate
   on his writing. He was succeeded as professor by his friend Georg
   Henrik von Wright. Much of his later work was done on the west coast of
   Ireland in the rural isolation he preferred. By 1949, when he was
   diagnosed as having prostate cancer, he had written most of the
   material that would be published after his death as Philosophische
   Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), which arguably contains
   his most important work.

   He spent the last two years of his life working in Vienna, the United
   States, Oxford, and Cambridge. He worked continuously on new material,
   inspired by the conversations that he had had with his friend and
   former student Norman Malcolm during a long vacation at the Malcolms'
   house in the United States. Malcolm had been wrestling with G.E.
   Moore's common sense response to external world skepticism ("Here is
   one hand, and here is another; therefore I know at least two external
   things exist"). Wittgenstein began to work on another series of remarks
   inspired by his conversations, which he continued to work on until two
   days before his death, and which were published posthumously as On
   Certainty.

   The only known fragment of music composed by Wittgenstein was premiered
   in November 2003. It is a piece of music that lasts less than half a
   minute.

   Wittgenstein died from prostate cancer at his doctor's home in
   Cambridge in 1951. His last words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful
   life."

Work

   Although many of Wittgenstein's notebooks, papers, and lectures have
   been published since his death, he published only one philosophical
   book in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921.
   Wittgenstein's early work was deeply influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer,
   and by the new systems of logic put forward by Bertrand Russell and
   Gottlob Frege. When the Tractatus was published, it was taken up as a
   major influence by the Vienna Circle positivists. However, Wittgenstein
   did not consider himself part of that school and alleged that logical
   positivism involved grave misunderstandings of the Tractatus.

   With the completion of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed he had
   solved all the problems of philosophy, and he abandoned his studies,
   working as a schoolteacher, a gardener at a monastery, and an
   architect, along with Paul Engelmann, on his sister's new house in
   Vienna. However, in 1929, he returned to Cambridge, was awarded a Ph.D.
   for the Tractatus, and took a teaching position there. He renounced or
   revised much of his earlier work, and his development of a new
   philosophical method and a new understanding of language culminated in
   his second magnum opus, the Philosophical Investigations, which was
   published posthumously.

The Tractatus

   In rough order, the first half of the book sets forth the following
   theses:
     * The world consists of independent atomic facts — existing states of
       affairs — out of which larger facts are built.
     * Language consists of atomic, and then larger-scale propositions
       that correspond to these facts by sharing the same "logical form".
     * Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts.
     * We can analyse our thoughts and sentences to express ("express" as
       in show, not say) their true logical form.
     * Those we cannot so analyse cannot be meaningfully discussed.
     * Philosophy consists of no more than this form of analysis: "Wovon
       man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one
       cannot speak, thereof one must be silent").

   Some commentators believe that, although no other type of discourse is,
   properly speaking, philosophy, Wittgenstein does imply that those
   things to be passed over "in silence" may be important or useful,
   according to some of his more cryptic propositions in the last sections
   of the Tractatus; indeed, that they may be the most important and most
   useful. He himself wrote about the Tractatus in a letter to his
   publisher Ficker:

     …the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words
     in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however,
     I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted
     to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is
     here, and of everything I have not written. And precisely this
     second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from
     within, as it were by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly
     speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think:
     All of that which many are babbling I have defined in my book by
     remaining silent about it.

     —Wittgenstein, Letter to Ludwig von Ficker, October or November
     1919, translated by Ray Monk

   Other commentators point out that the sentences of the Tractatus would
   not qualify as meaningful according to its own rigid criteria, and that
   Wittgenstein's method in the book does not follow its own demands
   regarding the only strictly correct philosophical method. This also is
   admitted by Wittgenstein, when he writes in proposition 6.54: ‘My
   propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally
   recognizes them as senseless’. These commentators believe that the book
   is deeply ironic, and that it demonstrates the ultimate nonsensicality
   of any sentence attempting to say something metaphysical, something
   about those fixations of metaphysical philosophers, about those things
   that must be passed over in silence, and about logic. He attempts to
   define the limits of logic in understanding the world.

   The work also contains several innovations in logic, including a
   version of the truth table.

The Philosophical Investigations

   Although the Tractatus is a major work, Wittgenstein is mostly studied
   today for the Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische
   Untersuchungen). In 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death, the
   long-awaited book was published in two parts. Most of the 693 numbered
   paragraphs in Part I were ready for printing in 1946, but Wittgenstein
   withdrew the manuscript from the publisher. The shorter Part II was
   added by the editors, G.E.M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees. (Had Wittgenstein
   lived to complete the book himself, some of the remarks in Part II
   would likely have been incorporated into Part I, and the book would no
   longer have this bifurcated structure.)

   It is notoriously difficult to find consensus among interpreters of
   Wittgenstein's work, and this is particularly true in the case of the
   Investigations. Very briefly, Wittgenstein asks the reader to think of
   language and its uses as a multiplicity of language-games within which
   the parts of language function and have meaning in order to resolve the
   problems of philosophy. This viewing of language represents what many
   consider a break from the Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and, hence,
   meaning as representation. In the carrying out of such an
   investigation, one of the most radical characteristics of the "later"
   Wittgenstein comes to light. The "conventional" view of philosophy's
   "task", perhaps coming to a head in Bertrand Russell, is that the
   philosopher's task is to solve the seemingly intractable problems of
   philosophy using logical analysis (for example, the problem of " free
   will", the relationship between "mind" and "matter", what is "the good"
   or "the beautiful" and so on). However, Wittgenstein argues that these
   "problems" are, in fact, "bewitchments" that arise from the
   philosophers' misuse of language.

   On Wittgenstein's account, language is inextricably woven into the
   fabric of life, and as part of that fabric it works unproblematically.
   Philosophical problems arise, on this account, when language is forced
   from its proper home and into a metaphysical environment, where all the
   familiar and necessary landmarks have been deliberately removed.
   Removed for what appear to be sound philosophical reasons, but which
   are, for Wittgenstein, the very source of the problem. Wittgenstein
   describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless
   ice; where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically
   and logically perfect language (the language of the Tractatus), where
   all philosophical problems can be solved without the confusing and
   muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, just because of the
   lack of friction, language can in fact do no actual work at all. There
   is much talk in the Investigations, then, of “idle wheels” and language
   being “on holiday” or a mere "ornament", all of which are used to
   express the idea of what is lacking in philosophical contexts. To
   resolve the problems encountered there, Wittgenstein argues that
   philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the “rough
   ground” of ordinary language in use; that is, philosophers must “bring
   words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”

   In this regard, Wittgenstein may be perceived as a successor to Kant,
   whose Critique of Pure Reason argues in a similar manner that when
   concepts are applied outside of the range of possible experience, they
   result in contradictions. The second part of Kant's Critique consists
   of refutation, typically by reductio ad absurdum or contradiction, of
   such matters as logical proofs of the existence of god, the existence
   of souls, infinity and necessity. Wittgenstein's objections to the use
   of language in inappropriate contexts mirrors Kant's objections to the
   non-empirical use of reason.

   Returning to the rough ground is, however, easier said than done.
   Philosophical problems having the character of depth, and running as
   deep as the forms of language and thought that set philosophers on the
   road to confusion. Wittgenstein therefore speaks of “illusions”,
   "bewitchment" and “conjuring tricks” performed on our thinking by our
   forms of language, and tries to break their spell by attending to
   differences between superficially similar aspects of language which he
   feels leads to this type of confusion. For much of the Investigations,
   then, Wittgenstein tries to show how philosophers are led away from the
   ordinary world of language in use by misleading aspects of language
   itself. He does this by looking in turn at the role language plays in
   the development of various philosophical problems, from some general
   problems involving language itself, then at the notions of rules and
   rule following, and then on to some more specific problems in
   philosophy of mind. Throughout these investigations, the style of
   writing is conversational with Wittgenstein in turn taking the role of
   the puzzled philosopher (on either or both sides of traditional
   philosophical debates), and that of the guide attempting to show the
   puzzled philosopher the way back: the “way out of the fly bottle.”

   Much of the Investigations, then, consists of examples of how
   philosophical confusion is generated and how, by a close examination of
   the actual workings of everyday language, the first false steps towards
   philosophical puzzlement can be avoided. By avoiding these first false
   steps, philosophical problems themselves simply no longer arise and are
   therefore dissolved rather than solved. As Wittgenstein puts it; "the
   clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply
   means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear."

Later work

     * On Certainty — A collection of aphorisms discussing the relation
       between knowledge and certainty, extremely influential in the
       philosophy of action.
     * Remarks on Colour — Remarks on Goethe's Theory of Colours.
     * Culture and Value — A collection of personal remarks about various
       cultural issues, such as religion and music, as well as critique of
       Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy.
     * Zettel, another collection of Wittgenstein's thoughts in
       fragmentary/"diary entry" format as with On Certainty and Culture
       and Value.

Important publications

     * Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14
       (1921)
          + Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by C.K. Ogden
            (1922)
     * Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953)
          + Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe
            (1953)
     * Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, ed. by G.H. von
       Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe (1956) (a selection from his
       writings on the philosophy of logic and mathematics between 1937
       and 1944)
          + Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, translated by
            G.E.M. Anscombe, rev. ed. (1978)
     * The Blue and Brown Books (1958) (Notes dictated in English to
       Cambridge students in 1933-35)
     * Philosophische Bemerkungen, ed. by Rush Rhees (1964)
          + Philosophical Remarks (1975)
     * Bemerkungen über die Farben, ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe (1977)
          + Remarks on Colour ISBN 0-520-03727-8

Works online

     * Review of P. Coffey's Science of Logic (1913): a polemical book
       review, written in 1912 for the March 1913 issue of the The
       Cambridge Review when Wittgenstein was an undergraduate studying
       with Russell. The review is the earliest public record of
       Wittgenstein's philosophical views.
     * Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922/1923), German text and
       Ogden-Ramsey translation
     * Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein at Project Gutenberg
     * Cambridge (1932-3) lecture notes
     * Lecture on Ethics
     * (A Few) Remarks

Influence

   Both his early and later work have been major influences in the
   development of analytic philosophy. Former students and colleagues
   include Gilbert Ryle, Friedrich Waismann, Norman Malcolm, G. E. M.
   Anscombe, Rush Rhees, Georg Henrik von Wright and Peter Geach.

   Contemporary philosophers heavily influenced by him include Michael
   Dummett, Donald Davidson, Peter Hacker, John R. Searle, Saul Kripke,
   John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, Anthony Quinton, Peter Strawson, Paul
   Horwich, Colin McGinn, Daniel Dennett, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell,
   Cora Diamond, James F. Conant, and Jean-François Lyotard.

   With others, Conant, Diamond and Cavell have been associated with an
   interpretation of Wittgenstein sometimes known as the New Wittgenstein.

   However, it cannot really be said that Wittgenstein founded a 'school'
   in any normal sense. The views of most of the above are generally
   contradictory. Indeed there are strong strains in his writings from the
   Tractatus onwards which would probably have regarded any such
   enterprise as fundamentally misguided.

   Wittgenstein has also had a significant influence on psychology and
   psychotherapy. Most significantly, social therapy has made use of
   Wittgenstein's language games as a tool for emotional growth.
   Psychologists and psychotherapist inspired by Wittgenstein's work
   include Fred Newman, Lois Holzman, Brian J. Mistler, and John Morss.

   Wittgentein's influence has extended beyond what is normally considered
   philosophy and may be found in various areas of the arts. A recent
   example is Steve Reich's 'You are' one of the movements of which is
   taken from 'On Certainty': 'Explanations come to an end somewhere'.
   Since Reich was at one time a philosophy student, publishing a thesis
   on Wittgenstein, this may be considered a legitimate use.

Works about Wittgenstein

     * The Jew of Linz, by Kimberley Cornish, puts forward the
       controversial thesis that Hitler's antisemitism arose from his
       dislike of Wittgenstein, and that Wittgenstein was a Soviet agent
       who recruited the " Cambridge Five".
     * E. L. Doctorow imagines a rivalry between Wittgenstein and Einstein
       in sections of his novel City of God, narrated as Wittgenstein.
     * Avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman directed Wittgenstein. The
       script and the original treatment by Terry Eagleton have been
       published as a book by the British Film Institute.
     * For an extensive account of Wittgenstein's design of the house for
       his sister in Vienna see the book Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect by
       Paul Wijdeveld, MIT Press, 1994. For a discussion of the connection
       between Wittgenstein's architecture and his philosophy see Kari
       Jormakka, "The Fifth Wittgenstein", Datutop 24, 2004.
     * The life of Wittgenstein has been recreated in a novel, The World
       as I Found It by Bruce Duffy (1997).
     * The famous non-meeting between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper has
       been described in the book Wittgenstein's Poker. The Story of a
       Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, by David
       Edmonds and John Eidenow (2002).

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