Ludwig Wittgenstein
1889–1951 2 entries
Biography
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher, one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1889, the youngest child of the steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein, he studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester before going to Cambridge in 1911 to work on logic with Bertrand Russell. As a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, which set out to show what language can say and what lies beyond it.
Believing he had solved the problems of philosophy, he gave away his inheritance and worked as a village schoolteacher, a monastery gardener and the architect of a house for his sister in Vienna. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, where he became a professor and came to reject much of his earlier work; during the Second World War he worked as a porter in a London hospital. His later thought, gathered in the Philosophical Investigations, was published after his death in Cambridge in 1951. His last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
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