Ludwig Wittgenstein

Key ideas

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus argues that meaningful sentences picture possible facts. Whatever cannot be pictured, including ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of life, cannot be said, though it may show itself. The book ends by declaring that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. It deeply influenced logical positivism, though Wittgenstein thought they misread it.

His later Philosophical Investigations rejects that picture. Words do not get their meaning by naming things; their meaning is their use in a 'language game', embedded in a form of life. Many philosophical problems, he argued, arise when language 'goes on holiday', and the cure is to look carefully at how words are actually used.

His private language argument and the image of a beetle in a box, which only its owner can see, challenge the idea that the meaning of words like 'pain' comes from private inner objects. They bear directly on qualia and the hard problem.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 7, trans. C. K. Ogden (1922)

Life, briefly

Wittgenstein was born into one of the richest families in Vienna and studied engineering before going to Cambridge to work with Bertrand Russell. He wrote much of the Tractatus as a soldier in the Austrian army during the First World War, then gave away his fortune and worked as a village schoolteacher and a gardener.

He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and became a professor there. During the Second World War he worked as a hospital porter in London. The Investigations were published after his death.

Major works

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
• Philosophical Investigations (1953)
• On Certainty (1969)

Schools of thought

Logical positivism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein
• WikipediaLudwig Wittgenstein