Project:About Wittgenstein

Essential biography

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 is widely considered one of the most important 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 the 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 Russell, who immediately noticed his sharp perspicacity, as well as his troubled attitude.

Later, he spent some time (1913-1914) in Skjolden, Norway, where he wrote and dictated his first works on logic (the Notes on Logic and the Notes dictated to G.E. Moore in Norway). At the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian army. The war was one of the most revealing experiences of Wittgenstein’s 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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (Vienna, 1889 – Cambridge, 1951). Photo by Moritz Nähr.

Turning away from philosophical thought, from 1922 to 1928 Wittgenstein devoted himself to elementary school teaching in a small Austrian village, to architecture – he built his sister Margarete’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 on his part.

In 1928, however, 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 in which the logical-philosophical theories of the Tractatus are thoroughly reconsidered: starting with the Lecture on Ethics (written and delivered in 1929-1930), 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 Philosophical Remarks, Philosophical Grammar, the Big Typescript, the Blue Book and the Brown Book, Zettel) by Wittgenstein himself, or annotated during lectures, transcribed, and edited by his students.

During World War II, he served in a civil hospital. In the period between 1947 and 1950 he spent time in 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, the masterpiece of the “later” Wittgenstein, which, ever since its publication in 1953, has been fertile ground for contemporary philosophy.

In his last years, he deepened his acquaintance with G.H. von Wright (1916-2003), Rush Rhees (1905-1989) and G.E.M. Anscombe (1919-2001), who later became the literary executors and published most of his posthumous works. 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”.

An outline of Wittgenstein's thought

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 was the investigation on language, but it would be reductive to limit the scope of his thought to the philosophy of language and logic. He was stimulated by Hertz, Frege, and Russell, but also Kraus, Spengler, Weininger, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. One cannot reduce his influence to the philosophical area either: 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.

The Trinity College in Cambridge, where Wittgenstein mostly lived and held lessons from 1929 to 1941.

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. The key idea of this first book is the distinction between what can be said (i.e. represented, thus the facts in the world) and what can only be shown (i.e. the forms of the representations); the Tractatus aims to delimit the realm of meaningful propositions to the realm of science and to prove that ethics, aesthetics, and logic are alike in that they cannot be expressed by words. Wandering between the strictly logical and mystical, Wittgenstein discusses topics that range from the picture-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, which is now traced back to linguistic practices – the well-known “language games” – that reveal specific configurations of human behaviour – “forms of life”. These notions reveal an affinity with the “linguistic-pragmatic turn” in the 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 “The Golden Bough”) and in his work on the foundations of mathematics.

The discontinuity between his youthful thought and his mature reflections has often been emphasized – even by Wittgenstein himself, in some passages – especially in relation to the connotation of the nature of language – formally structured in the “early” Wittgenstein, linked to the variable forms of culture in the “later” 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 and The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project's policy

Wittgenstein wrote a lot but published little: a very short, and hilarious, review of Peter Coffey’s The Science of Logic; the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; a dictionary, or rather a spelling book, for German-speaking schoolchildren; an academic article by the title Some Remarks on Logical Form; a letter to the editor of Mind. Almost everything we now have in volume format was published posthumously. After Wittgenstein died in 1951, his appointed literary executors, E. Anscombe, R. Rhees and G. von Wright, were left with the task of sorting and grouping his handwritten notes and typescripts in order to publish them.

Now, the Nachlass itself – the collection of Wittgenstein’s manuscript material, the “raw” Wittgenstein – has been available online since the 2010s, almost in its entirety, both in a fac-simile edition and in an XML/HTML transcription. This was made possible by the generosity of the copyright holders of the originals, The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the work of the Wittgenstein Archives Bergen. Much of the digitalized content has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

A scan of Ms-102,14v (diary entry dated 13 November 1914). The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, The University of Bergen, Bergen, CC BY-NC.

Some parts of the Nachlass were carefully prepared for publication by Wittgenstein himself, and it is fair to assume that he would have had them printed had he lived longer. The Philosophical Investigations, for which he even wrote a preface in 1945, are the best example of a text thoroughly crafted by Wittgenstein and ready for the press by the time he passed away. In other cases, however, his notes were only published as books after undergoing extensive editing: this is the case, for example, with the lectures he held in Cambridge and the private conversations, that we have received through notes taken by his students and interlocutors. There are as well midway cases, texts such as On Certainty, Remarks on Colours, Zettel, Philosophical Grammar, Culture and Value; in order to prepare this texts for publication the editors selected, grouped, and sorted the remarks.

Based on our expertise in the field of copyright, we at The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project decided to only publish those texts for which we had strong reasons to determine that the editor’s work can not be considered creative. The list of available texts meeting these criteria is constantly being updated.

Individual works

Review of P. Coffey, The science of logic Expand

In 1913, Wittgenstein published a very short review of philosopher and mathematician Peter Coffey’s The science of logic in The Cambridge Review (vol. 34, no. 853, 6 Mar. 1913, p. 351). In an openly ironic tone, Wittgenstein argues against the antiquated views of the author and the inaccuracies of the logical notions he expresses, some of which – such as the subject-predicate form of the proposition, the relationship between thought and reality, and the logical-semantic function of the verb “to be” – will have an important development in Wittgenstein’s own later works.

Go to Review of P. Coffey, The science of logic

Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough Expand

According to Rush Rhees, in 1929 Wittgenstein’s disciple Maurice O’Connor Drury (1907-1976) procured and read to his mentor passages from the English anthropologist Sir James George Frazer's (1854-1941) The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (in the 12-volume edition of 1906-1915). A series of remarks in German were drawn by Wittgenstein from the reading in 1931; they were later revised and expanded, after 1936 and probably after 1948. Rhees edited the notes on Frazer for publication and they appeared in 1967 in the German journal Synthese. The published text brings together extracts of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass Ms-110, Ts-211 and Ms-143.

In his Remarks on Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”, Wittgenstein openly opposes the tendency in anthropology to rationalize apparently irrational practices and behaviours belonging to the sphere of magic and the sacred in non-western societies. To this type of reduction Wittgenstein opposes an account based on the cultural-relative validity of linguistic practices, significantly accusing Frazer of being “far more savage than most of his savages, for these savages will not be as far removed from an understanding of spiritual matters as an Englishman of the twentieth century”. The understanding of anthropological phenomena must therefore be relative to the context in which they take place, and in which, for example, a sacrificial or ritual practice is not traceable to the modern scientific explanation, because it arises in an entirely different form of life. Such forms of life can are manifest in the language games in which they are embodied, so that, quoting another famous statement from the book, “a whole mythology is deposited in our language”.

In bringing an explicit content to contemporary anthropology, Wittgensteinian philosophy thus takes on here some epistemological questions, which will be called up on several occasions in the Philosophical Investigations and in On Certainty.

Go to "Bemerkungen über Frazers The Golden Bough"