Ludwig Wittgenstein

1889-1951. Austrian Philosopher who wrote significant works on language and meaning.

Life

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 as the youngest of seven children of Carl Wittgenstein, the creator of Austria’s prewar iron and steel industry. Influenced by his father's occupation his ambition in early life was to become an engineer and in 1906 he enrolled at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg, where he spent three semesters. He then went to Manchester University in 1908 to continue his studies.

His mathematical work in engineering aroused his interest in logic, and in 1911 Wittgenstein went to Cambridge to study Philosophy as a pupil of Bertrand Russel, prior to spending the year before the outbreak of World War I in seclusion in Norway working on logic.

When the war began, Wittgenstein immediately volunteered for the Austrian Army. From 1912 to 1917, while on active service, he worked on and completed the manuscript of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which today is regarded as one the the greatest philosophical achievements of the 20th century. During the years after the war, however, the manuscript was being handed from publisher to publisher and rejected over and over again until finally being published in 1921.

After the war Ludwig Wittgenstein worked as gardener, hotel porter and finally spent six years as an elementary school teacher in Austria.

In 1929 he returned to Cambridge and was soon awarded the doctorate. In 1939 he became Professor of Philosophy and held his position until 1947, when he retired in order to devote more time to writing.

He died in in Cambridge, England, in 1951.

Works on Language and Meaning

Wittgenstein wrote voluminously, but his only philosophical work to be published during his lifetime was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and a brief article in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. His other works have been published posthumously. His Philosophical Investigations, which is considered the most important of his works, was published in 1953.

There is a noticeable shift in Wittgenstein’s work, especially considering his approach to language, prompting critics to talk of the 'early' and the 'late' Wittgenstein.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein tries to determine what conditions have to be fulfilled for a precisely meaningful language to exist. He wants to draw a clear line of demarcation between science and non-science, which, according to him, corresponds to the line between factual and non-factual language. According to the Tractatus the main function of language is to depict the world, making each sentence a representation of reality, a concept Wittgenstein himself criticised in his later works.

Philosophical Investigations

The first sections of this work are a direct attack on the central theses Wittgenstein proposed in the Tractatus. He drops his claim of the existence of a single language of science and replaces it with the view of language as a multitude of interacting language-games with their own rules of use.

There are four main theses on language in his book, according to Ahmed:

1. meaningful sentences are combinations of names
2. everything that can be said, can be said precisely, or not at all
3. meaning and understanding are understood as mental processes accompanying language
4. people can think and talk about their inner states independently of their surroundings

Sources

Ahmed, Arif. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. London, New York: Continuum, 2010.

Ascombe, G.E.M.. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. London: Hutchinson, 1959.

Bartley, William Warren. Wittgenstein. Philadelphia, New York: Lippincott, 1973.

Bensch, Rudolf. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bonn: Bouvier, 1973.

Bloor, David. Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1983.

Norman, Malcolm. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.