Ludwig Wittgenstein

1889-1951 · Austrian-British · Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Mathematics, Logic, Ordinary Language Philosophy

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Born into one of the wealthiest families in Vienna, Ludwig Wittgenstein gave away his inheritance, volunteered for dangerous posts in the First World War, and spent a decade as a village schoolteacher in rural Austria. He came to Cambridge in 1911 to study with Bertrand Russell, and in the trenches composed the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — a work he believed had solved philosophy's central problems. Then he walked away from it.

Topics Ludwig Wittgenstein addresses

• the picture theory of language
• language-games
• forms of life
• the private language argument
• family resemblance
• meaning as use
• rule-following
• the saying-showing distinction
• logical atomism
• the general propositional form
• elementary propositions
• truth-functions
• the beetle in the box
• aspect-seeing
• philosophical therapy
• the Augustinian picture of language
• grammar
• criteria
• the limits of language
• whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
• the world is everything that is the case
• states of affairs
• objects and names
• logical space

Converse with Ludwig Wittgenstein on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Ludwig Wittgenstein's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.