Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher whose work profoundly influenced twentieth-century logic, philosophy of language, and analytic philosophy, and whose career is commonly divided between an early and a later philosophical period. Born in Vienna into a wealthy industrial family, he initially studied engineering and aeronautics before turning to mathematics, logic, and philosophy and going to Cambridge in 1911 to study under Bertrand Russell. During the First World War, Wittgenstein served in the Austro-Hungarian army while developing the ideas that became Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in German in 1921 and in English in 1922. The Tractatus attempted to clarify the relationship between language, logic, and reality by arguing that meaningful propositions represent possible states of affairs and that philosophical problems often arise from misunderstanding the limits of language. After several years away from academic philosophy, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 and developed a markedly different approach. His later work, culminating in Philosophical Investigations, rejected the search for a single underlying logical structure of ordinary language and instead examined the diverse functions of words within particular language-games and forms of life. Wittgenstein’s insistence that many philosophical problems arise from the misuse or misunderstanding of language became one of the most influential methodological ideas in modern philosophy.