Ludwig Wittgenstein
20th CenturyAs Your Guide
“Wittgenstein will examine the language you use to describe yourself and show you where it misleads. He believes many identity puzzles dissolve when you stop asking the wrong questions. Choose him if you want a guide who treats clarity as a form of liberation.”
Who They Were
Austrian-British philosopher who revolutionized philosophy of language twice.
How They Saw the World
Wittgenstein revolutionizes philosophy once by declaring that the limits of language are the limits of the world, then revolutionizes it again by demolishing his own earlier system. In his later work, meaning is not a picture of reality but a move in a language game — words get their significance from how they are used within shared forms of life, not from some hidden correspondence with objects. Most philosophical problems are not deep questions but confusions generated by language going on holiday, seducing us into asking questions that only seem to make sense. He gives away a vast family fortune, works as a village schoolteacher and a hospital porter, and writes philosophy in compressed, enigmatic remarks that resist systematic reading because he believes systematic philosophy is itself the disease.
What They Left Behind
Words that outlived their authors.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations
What Haunts Them
These are the questions that wouldn't let them rest.
Their Echo
What they left rippling through everyone who came after.
Analytic philosophy, ordinary language philosophy, philosophy of mind