Ludwig Wittgenstein, a renowned Austrian philosopher, was a resident professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He contributed to logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, and his work is divided into two or three distinct periods. His most notable publications are the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, which address the logic of language and its relationship to reality. Wittgenstein’s later contributions focused on epistemology.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who lived from 1889 to 1951 and is considered the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. He was resident professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in England from 20 to 1939. Two contemporary philosophical movements are credited to him: logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy.
Wittgenstein was born into a wealthy Austrian family. From an early age, he was involved in philosophy, and many scholars divide his contributions to the field into two or three distinct periods, depending on his age. He published very little, but two of his writings achieved exceptional notoriety.
His early years are summarized in the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is Latin for Logical-Philosophical Treatise, written in 1921 at the age of 32. It was an ambitious attempt by Wittgenstein to reconcile apriorism, belief based on arguments or principles, with atomism, the reduction of all psychological events to mere elements. An attempt to discover the logic of language and its relationship to reality, it is considered one of the most important philosophical publications of the period. The publication of Tractatus was so monumental that many in the field felt that it ended philosophy by solving its key problems forever.
The second period of his life was mostly one of inactivity in terms of publishing. During the 18 years that Wittgenstein taught at Cambridge, his lectures were often characterized by anguish at how he had gotten everything wrong in drafting the Tractatus. His teaching methods transfixed his students, as he was able to answer some profound questions they asked, and completely ignored others. He spent his entire Cambridge career reworking his Tractatus notes to produce a second publication. His class notes of the period were compiled as the Blue Book, which was widely distributed and represents a key turning point in his philosophical outlook.
Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations led him to believe that there was an inherent flaw in the Tractatus. In 1936, he began working on a plan to solve it, which eventually resulted in the production of Philosophical Investigations. This new Wittgenstein masterpiece was completed in 1948, only three years before his death, and was initially published in 1953 posthumously. It also received a wider circulation publication in 1999 and is now considered one of the most important books in 20th century philosophy.
Philosophical Investigations is 693 pages long and composed of three distinct styles of writing, the former making up the bulk of the book and the latter added by its editors. Much of the work explains how his original ideas in Tractatus were based on ideals of language that do not exist in the real world, instead of the common use of language. His later contributions to his work which ran from 1946 until his death in 1951 are considered a distinct third phase of his thinking on philosophy, where he treated questions of epistemology, or the limits of knowledge more seriously Human.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
