CONTENTS
- BIO
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (Vienna, 26 April 1889 - Cambridge, 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who mostly worked and taught at the University of Cambridge. He’s widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.
Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, he soon became acquainted with the most relevant figures of Viennese “fin de siècle” culture (J. Brahms, G. Klimt, G. Mahler, K. Kraus). He completed his studies in mechanical engineering in Manchester, where he developed a keen interest in the works on logic and philosophy of mathematics by Gottlob Frege (1948-1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). He therefore moved to Cambridge in 1911 to attend the lessons of Russel, who immediately noticed his sharp perspicacity, as well as his troubled attitude.
Later, he spent some time (1913-1914) in Skjolden (Norway) where his first works on logic appeared. At the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian army. The war represented for Wittgenstein one of the most revealing experiences of his life. Amid the harshness of the conflict, his first and only published work – the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, completed during his imprisonment in Cassino (1918-1919) – came to light. The book was published in a first German edition, disapproved by the author, in 1921 and later in the English translation by Wittgenstein’s friend Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) in 1922.
Turning away from philosophical tought, from 1922 to 1928 Wittgenstein devoted himself to elementary school teaching in a small Austrian village, to architecture – he built his sister Hermine's house – and to working as a gardener in a convent. The interest which the newborn, neo-positivist Vienna Circle paid to his work elicited rather cold reactions from his part.
However, in 1928 a conference at mathematician Luitzen Brouwer’s (1881-1966) house reawakened his interest in philosophy, convincing him to move back to Cambridge, where he obtained the teaching qualification. The years from 1928 to 1941 are remembered as a period of verification of the logical-philosophical thinking of the Tractatus: starting with the Lecture on ethics (written and delivered in 1929), he revised and modified his ideas on language, logic, the foundations of mathematics, psychology, anthropology, and symbolic forms. The result of these reflections was collected in a series of manuscripts and typescripts (including the Blue Book, the Brown Book, the Big Typescript, Zettel) by Wittgenstein himself, or annotated during lectures, transcribed, and edited by his students.
During World War II, he served in a civil hospital. He spent the period between 1947 and 1950 between England, Ireland, and the USA, where in the summer of 1949 he sketched out his On Certainty. But his best known and most memorable, albeit unfinished work from this period remains the Philosophical Investigations, which summarized the thinking of the “second” Wittgenstein and, ever since publication in 1953, it has opened flourishing perspectives for contemporary philosophy.
In his last years, he deepened his knowledge of Georg von Wright (1916-2003), Rush Rhees (1905-1989) and Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), who later became the executors of his posthumous work. He died in 1951 at the age of 62.
His most famous words: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 7). His last words: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life".
WITTGENSTEIN'S THOUGHT QUICK OUTLINE
Wittgenstein's philosophical production touched upon numerous critical points in contemporary philosophy. It is not incorrect to say that Wittgenstein's major concern throughout his life remained the investigation of language, but it would be reductive to limit his thought to the philosophy of language and logic. He was stimulated by Weininger, Frege, Russel, Spengler…, but also Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. One cannot either reduce his influences to the philosophical area: he was an attentive reader of Goethe and appreciator of German poetry. Music, moreover, and particularly the classical romantic music of the Liederists and Brahms, remained one of his primary sources of inspiration.
At the time of the Tractatus, the influence of the prevailing logicism restricted his consideration of symbolism to a representational and “realist” perspective, although he brought brilliant innovations to coeval philosophy - from the theory of proposition and logical atomism to truth-functionality, from the foundations of ontology and epistemology to the conception of the normativity of natural laws, from reflection on solipsism to ethics, aesthetics and even theology. The logical Wittgenstein of the Tractatus particularly conditioned the emergence of the neo-positivist philosophy of the so-called Vienna Circle, which was formed in the Austrian capital during the first post-war period and brought together thinkers such as Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and Friedrich Waismann (1896-1959).
The period of the Philosophical Investigations coincides with an evolution in Wittgenstein’s consideration of language, traced back to linguistic practices – the well-known "language games" – that reveal specific configurations of the human being – "forms of life". These notions reveal an affinity with the "linguistic-pragmatic turn" in philosophy of language, and are applied variously by the author in the philosophy of psychology, in anthropological reflections (see, for example, his Notes on Frazer's Golden Branch) and in his work on the foundations of mathematics.
It has often been emphasized – even by Wittgenstein himself, in some passages – the discontinuity between his youthful thought and his mature reflections, especially in relation to the connotation of the nature of language – formally structured in the "first" Wittgenstein, linked to the variable forms of culture in the "second" Wittgenstein. However, lines of continuity can be discerned, especially in the conception of philosophy as a "critique of language" and the "ethical point" of philosophical work, which is not intended to operate a foundation or give rise to a theory, but contains a transformative force of the human being.
- About Wittgenstein’s works
- how many, where and what they are
- [single published works in as many collapsibles]