Wittgenstein thought he had solved philosophy, then spent decades dismantling his own answer
Heir to one of Europe's largest fortunes, Ludwig Wittgenstein gave his money away, taught village school, and published one slim book claiming to settle every philosophical problem. Back at Cambridge, he rejected much of it: meaning, he came to argue, lies in how words are used within a language game.
He was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, the youngest of nine children of Karl Wittgenstein, a steel magnate often compared to his friend Andrew Carnegie. Only the Rothschilds were richer in Austria-Hungary. The family palace held seven grand pianos; Brahms and Mahler performed there, and Klimt painted one of the sisters. Ludwig had absolute pitch, was a remarkable whistler, and took up the clarinet in his thirties. Karl kept his sons at home with tutors, and Ludwig only reached a technical school in Linz at 14.
From 1911 to 1913 he studied at Cambridge under Bertrand Russell, mixing with John Maynard Keynes and G. E. Moore. When the First World War began he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army, was decorated for bravery, and ended up in an Italian prison camp. The losses of those years, including his friend David Pinsent, left him depressed; he handed his remaining inheritance to his siblings and became a schoolteacher near Vienna, where his harsh physical punishment of pupils caused scandal.
His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus appeared in 1921, with an English version the next year helped by Frank Ramsey. It treated philosophy as a matter of the logical link between propositions and the world, and its author believed that exposing that logic dissolved every problem. Urged by Russell, Keynes and Ramsey, he went back to Cambridge and taught from 1930 to 1947, apart from wartime work at Guy's Hospital in London and an infirmary in Newcastle.
The later Wittgenstein abandoned many of those early assumptions. Words, he argued, do not mirror facts; their meaning is their use inside a particular practice or game of language. He published nothing more in his lifetime. After his death on 29 April 1951, editors worked through his manuscripts, and Philosophical Investigations came out in 1953. Commentators broadly agree he ranks among the most important twentieth-century philosophers.
Source: Ludwig Wittgenstein
