Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: biography, personal life, quotes

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:45

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the brightest, paradoxical and charismatic philosophers of the 20th century. Despite the fact that he was not recognized by his contemporaries and was aloof from society, he had a great influence on the formation of modern principles and laws of thought. Wittgenstein was the forerunner of at least three intellectual philosophical currents - logical positivism, linguistic philosophy and linguistic analysis.

Short biography

Austria and Great Britain had a great influence on the life and philosophy of such a thinker as Ludwig Wittgenstein. A short biography clearly indicates this. The future philosopher was born in Vienna in one of the most famous and we althy families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a famous engineer and tycoon, and his mother came from an ancient Jewish family.

Like his father, Ludwig Wittgenstein began to study engineering, in particular he was interested in the design of aircraft. Over time, this led him to the problem of the philosophical basis of mathematics. In addition, there were other thingsinterested in Ludwig Wittgenstein. The biography indicates that he was fond of music, sculpture, architecture, literature and art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein left for Cambridge, where he became a student, and later assistant and friend, of the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell.

During World War I, Wittgenstein volunteered for the front, where he was taken prisoner. During his stay in a prisoner of war camp, he practically finished one of his most famous works - "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" - which had a huge impact on the development of European and world philosophy. After that, he worked as a teacher in an ordinary rural school. Over time, Wittgenstein realizes that his philosophy is largely erroneous and needs to be improved, so he again returns to the UK, where he continues to work on his treatise, while being a professor at Cambridge University.

During the Second World War, he works as an orderly, and is also engaged in his new direction - the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein died in 1953 from prostate cancer. All of his ideas on the philosophy of language were published posthumously.

Wittgenstein's early philosophy

In his younger years, Ludwig Wittgenstein was actively interested in the activities of the literary-critical avant-garde in Vienna, and was also interested in the ideas of K. Kraus, the editor of the Fakel magazine, who de alt with the separation of value and fact in art. Wittgenstein was also strongly influenced by the ideas of G. Frege and B. Russell,under which he worked for a long time. From the first, he adopted the idea of a propositional function, true meaning, as well as the semantic difference in meaning and meaning of expressions in a language, from the second, a method of analyzing language in a logical way, which includes the search for "atomic" facts, as well as individual elements of the logical description of mathematics.

Wittgenstein's first logical ideas were formulated in his Diaries, where he talks about the possibilities of new logic and logical syntax. These reflections became the basis for his key work of this period, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The work was published in 1921, first in German and then in English. The book is written in the form of individual aphorisms, which Ludwig Wittgenstein used to interpret his ideas. The quotes are placed next to the corresponding numbers, indicating the level of importance of a particular aphorism.

Despite the similarities with the ideas of Russell and Frege, the book was unique in many ways. The treatise raises the question of the possibilities and limits of thinking, while the author combines the concepts of thinking and language, while philosophy acts as a kind of analytical criticism of language. In Wittgenstein's concept, language performs the function of denoting facts, which is possible due to the internal logical structure of the language. This doctrine still plays an important role in contemporary Western intellectual currents.

Wittgenstein's late philosophy

Over timeLudwig Wittgenstein rethought his position and abandoned the a priori structure of language. It indicates the variety of words and expressions that are used in natural language. In accordance with this, the word does not act as a mental image of the object, only the use of words in the context in accordance with linguistic rules gives the word a certain meaning.

Wittgenstein operates with such a concept as language games, where each word gets its meaning only when certain conditions of the game are met. Wittgenstein also points to the need to ask the right questions. Wittgenstein's late philosophical position is described in his Philosophical Investigations.

Philosophical Investigations

The last significant book that Ludwig Wittgenstein worked on. Philosophy is briefly described from the introductory part of the book, where the author indicates that this work should be considered in comparison with the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".

Unlike the earlier work, the Philosophical Investigations does not have a prophetic style and is divided into two parts. The first part has the following structure:

• The concept of language and its meaning.
• Analysis of epistemological and psychological concepts.
• Analysis of the international aspects of the previously mentioned concepts.

The second part of the book is less structured and has an unfinished look. Here the author talks about words, their meaning and the functions of philosophy in these matters.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the mostenigmatic philosophers of the twentieth century. Unlike his contemporaries, he not only thought, but also lived in accordance with his views. It was thanks to him that philosophy became the philosophy of language - a science that considers how people see and describe the world.