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Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on April 26, 1889, the youngest of eight children. He went to school in Linz and Berlin, then went to England to study engineering at the University of Manchester. Here he worked on both theoretical and practical exercises, building a propeller, for instance, and testing it, as well as understanding its design theoretically. He developed an interest in pure mathematics, an interest that directed him to Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study with Bertrand Russell. At Cambridge he switched his focus to philosophy.
In 1912 Wittgenstein presented his first paper, What is Philosophy?, to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In this paper is early evidence that Wittgenstein appreciated the importance of searching out appropriate methods for approaching philosophical problems. While at Cambridge, Wittgenstein continued to work on the foundations of mathematics and mathematical logic. He found the philosophical discussions at the school shallow, however, and sought a new place to work. He chose Skjolden, Norway, and lived there in isolation. The work on logic and language that he would produce here during this fruitful period would lead to his important book the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
In 1914 Wittgenstein moved to Vienna to join the Austrian army, serving in a ship and then in an artillery workshop. In 1916 he went to the Russian front, gaining numerous distinctions for bravery. In 1918 he was sent to north Italy with an artillery regiment, and was taken prisoner there at the end of the first World War. While in active service he had continued to write his Tractacus, carrying the manuscript in his rucksack. Wittgenstein, while he was in prison, was given permission to send the manuscript to Russell, and the work was published in 1921. In this early work, Wittgenstein was inspired by Russell's logical analysis. He describes a logically structured language that expresses thoughts that are pictures of a world composed of facts. In this structure, the analytic propositions of logic and mathematics are only formal tautologies, while atomic sentences can express the data of sense experience. Any other use of language he saw as an attempt to say what cannot be put into words, and he imagined that metaphysics and ethics reach beyond the limitations of our linguistic ability. The Tractacus is a series of reminders of the limits of human language. It became the basis for the principles of the logical positivists and their anti-metaphysical philosophical stance. Wittgenstein saw the work as holding the final solution to his questions about philosophy. Satisfied, he turned from philosophy and taught elementary school in an Austrian village for a few years.
In 1929 he returned to philosophy, and went back to Cambridge to submit the Tractacus as his doctoral thesis. He took a position with the faculty of Trinity College. According to notes taken by his students, he never prepared notes for his lectures, but preferred to recollect the course of inquiry from the previous lecture, summarize this for the class, then continue from there to advance the investigation. He felt that to read the lecture from notes made the ideas seem dead, so every lecture was basically composed of entirely new research. He began to rethink sections of the Tractacus and develop the ideas he would present in Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953). His early theories were beginning to transform contemporary philosophy, yet he now felt that they demanded too much precision from human expression. In Philosophical Investigations he explores the idea of the "language games" of ordinary language in which the meaning of words is only loosely connected to their use. He argues that there are many ways in which language works, and direct reference is only one. He imagined that philosophy operates under the enchanting belief that language can successfully capture reality, and is thus a therapeutic activity, relieving the confusion caused by philosophical misuses of ordinary language.
Wittgenstein saw a great error in philosophical tradition in that it has accepted reports of subjective individual experience as primary sources for human knowledge. He cited problems in the philosophy of mind and blamed the employment of private languages that might express interior mental states, stating that this was an avoidable mistake. His work on this particular issue became highly influential to Rylke and other thinkers. Later in his work, Wittgenstein would apply these beliefs and method of analysis to epistemological, mathematical, and ethical problems.
Wittgenstein was known as both a sensitive and intense man, with a confident personality, who spent much time alone and went through bouts with depression. He was known for the memorable impression he left with those who came in contact with him. He lived simply and hated pretense. In 1947 Wittgenstein retired. In 1949 he was diagnosed with cancer. Undaunted, he claimed he did not want to live any longer anyway. He continued working on his ideas until he died in Cambridge on April 29, 1951.
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