Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann

(1889-1951)

   Among the most influential and revered of twentieth-century philosophers, Wittgenstein was deeply sceptical of traditional philosophy. Wittgenstein came from Austria in 1911 to study with Bertrand Russell, and later completed a draft of his first great work, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921), while on the battlefield in the First World War. This bold work, written in a terse and enigmatic style, develops a logical analysis of language that seeks to reduce every meaningful utterance to an atomic sentence, which is formally isomorphic with a possible state of affairs. Those sentences that fail this test (including those of ethics, theology, philosophy and indeed the Tractatus itself) are in fact meaningless. Hence Wittgenstein concluded: 'Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.' After the publication of this book, Wittgenstein stayed away from formal philosophy for a number of years until in 1928 he returned to Cambridge, where he remained for the rest of his career. Wittgenstein's second great work, the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), differs markedly from the Tractatus. Wittgenstein came to eschew metaphysics and view philosophy as a therapeutic analysis of forms of life. To this end he concluded that meaning is found in the use of language, and through the analysis of use he sought to dissolve many classical philosophical dilemmas, including the mind/body problem and the problem of other minds. Wittgenstein's influence has been substantial. While the Tractatus became a seminal text for logical positivism Wittgenstein retained a mystical openness to what transcends language. His greater impact, however, has been through Philosophical Investigations, a work whose enigmatic comments on language games, private language and forms of life have left little of contemporary philosophy and theology untouched.

   See language game; Malcolm, Norman; philosophy, analytical; positivism, logical; Russell, Bertrand Arthur William

   Further reading: Baker and Hacker 1980-96; Fogelin 1987; Glock 1996; Kenny 1994; Kerr 2002; Kripke 1982; Malcolm 1962; Wittgenstein 1958, 1960-, 1975 and 1979