Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Ludwig Wittgenstein Western Philosophy
20th century philosophy

Full name Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
Birth 26 April 1889
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Death 29 April 1951 (aged 62)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
School/tradition Analytic philosophy, Post-Analytic Philosophy
Main interests Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mathematics, Philosophy of mind, Epistemology
Notable ideas "Meaning is use," private language argument, conceptual therapy, saying/showing, seeing-as.
Influenced by[show]
Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, Moore, Sraffa, Benedict Spinoza, William James, Ramsey, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hertz, Boltzmann, Kraus, Weininger, Augustine, Goethe, Spengler, Friedrich Nietzsche
Influenced[show]
Russell, G. E. M. Anscombe, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, Gilbert Ryle, P.M.S. Hacker, Vienna Circle, Logical Positivism, Analytic Philosophy, Ordinary Language Philosophy
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (pronounced [ˈluːtvɪç ˈjoːzɛf ˈjoːhan ˈvɪtgənʃtaɪn]) (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austria-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.[1]

His writing inspired two of the twentieth century's principal philosophical movements - the Vienna Circle and Oxford ordinary language philosophy. According to an end of the century poll, professional philosophers in Canada and the U.S. rank both Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations among the top five most important books in twentieth-century philosophy, the latter standing out as "...the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations" [2]. Wittgenstein's influence has been felt in nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences, yet there are widely diverging interpretations of his thought.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, to Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. He was the youngest of eight children, born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father's parents, Hermann Christian and Fanny Wittgenstein (who was a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim [4]), were born into Jewish families but later converted to Protestantism, and after they moved from Saxony to Vienna in the 1850s, assimilated into the Viennese Protestant professional classes. Ludwig's father, Karl Wittgenstein, became an industrialist and went on to make a fortune in iron and steel. By the late 1880s, Karl had acquired one of the largest fortunes in Europe [5] Eventually, Karl transferred much of his fortune into real estate, stocks and shares, spread across Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands and North America. Consequently, the family's colossal wealth was insulated from the inflation-crises which followed in subsequent years.[6] Ludwig's mother Leopoldine, born Kalmus, was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich von Hayek. Despite his parents's Protestantism, the Wittgenstein children were baptized as Roman Catholics—the faith of their maternal grandmother—and Ludwig was given a Roman Catholic burial upon his death.