Ludwig Wittgenstein

Biography

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Born in Vienna into one of Europe’s wealthiest families—his father was a steel magnate and their home hosted Brahms, Mahler, and Klimt—Wittgenstein studied engineering before turning to philosophy under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. His first major work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), attempted to delineate the limits of language and meaning, arguing that what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence. Believing he had solved all philosophical problems, Wittgenstein gave away his inheritance and worked as a schoolteacher, gardener, and architect before returning to Cambridge in 1929. His later philosophy, published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations (1953), dramatically reversed many of his earlier positions, developing the concepts of language games, family resemblances, and the impossibility of a private language. Wittgenstein’s two philosophical phases—the early logical atomism and the later ordinary language philosophy—each independently revolutionized the discipline. His austere personality, ethical intensity, and dramatic biography have made him one of the most studied and mythologized figures in modern intellectual history.