Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann 1889-1951
Austrian-born British philosopher, one of the 20th century's most influential figures in British philosophy

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, the youngest of eight children in a wealthy and cultivated family; his father was an industrialist. He was educated at home until the age of 14, then at an Austrian school for three years. He developed a strong interest in machinery, and went on to study mechanical engineering at Berlin (1906-08) and at Manchester (1908-11), where he undertook research on aeronautics and designed a jet-reaction propeller. There his reading of Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics (1903) turned his attention to mathematics; in 1911 he abandoned his engineering research and moved to Cambridge to study mathematical logic under Russell (1912-13). He studied with enormous intensity and Russell said admiringly that he 'soon knew all that I had to teach'.

Wittgenstein served in World War I as an artillery officer in the Austrian army and was taken prisoner on the Italian front in 1918. Throughout the war he had continued to work on problems in logic, carrying his notebooks round with him in his rucksack, and in the POW camp near Monte Cassino he completed his first work, the only one published in his lifetime, and sent it to Russell in England. It was eventually published in 1921 under the title Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (and then in 1922, with a parallel German-English text and an introduction from Russell, as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). This was a novel, rather startling work, consisting of a series of numbered, aphoristic remarks centred on the nature and limits of language. Meaningful language, he conceived, must consist in 'atomic propositions' that are pictures of the facts of which the world is composed. On this criterion we must discard as literally meaningless much of our conventional discourse, including judgements of value, and many of the claims of speculative philosophy. And since the limits of language are also the limits of thought he reaches the portentous conclusion that 'what we cannot speak about we must be silent about'.

This scheme for a logically foolproof language, a perfect instrument for meaningful assertion, appeared to represent a kind of terminus and Wittgenstein now turned away from philosophy to find another vocation. He gave away the money he had inherited and lived a simple ascetic life, working as an elementary schoolteacher in Austrian country districts (1920-26), a gardener's assistant in a monastery, and an amateur architect and builder commissioned by one of his sisters. In the late 1920s he was sought out by various philosophers who had found inspiration in the Tractatus, particularly Moritz Schlick and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. He revived his philosophical interests and returned to Cambridge in 1929, first as Research Fellow of Trinity College and then as Professor of Philosophy, a post to which he was appointed in 1939 but which he could not take up until 1945, at the end of World War II, during which he had served as a medical orderly. After two years, he resigned, and went to live in Ireland for a time.

He became a naturalized British subject in 1938. At Cambridge his philosophy began to take a quite new direction; he attracted a group of devoted pupils and through his lectures and the circulation of his students' notes he came to exert a powerful influence on philosophy throughout the English-speaking world. The work of this second period of his philosophical career is best summarized in the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953), a discursive and often enigmatic work which rejects most of the assumptions and conclusions of the Tractatus.

In the Investigations Wittgenstein no longer tries to reduce language to a perfect logical model, but rather points to the variety, open-endedness and subtlety of everyday language and explores the actual communicative and social functions of different modes of speech or 'language games'. Language is seen essentially as a toolkit. Philosophy then becomes a therapeutic technique of 'assembling reminders' of usage, which reveal the source of many philosophical paradoxes in the misunderstanding of ordinary language and the obsessive search for unity or simplicity where none exists. Instead of expecting each concept to have a single, defining essence we should rather look for a range of overlapping 'family resemblances'.

Wittgenstein visited a friend in the USA, returning to England in 1949, where he spent the last two years of his life living with friends in Oxford and Cambridge. He died of cancer in Cambridge in 1951; since then there has been a continuous stream of posthumously edited publications from his prolific notebooks and manuscripts, including Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956), The Blue and Brown Books (1958), Philosophische Bemerkungen (1964) and On Certainty (1969).

Bibliography: Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (2nd edition, 1984); Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (1973); K T Fann, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy (1967).