Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Wittgenstein" redirects here. For other uses, see Wittgenstein (disambiguation).

Ludwig Wittgenstein
photograph Photographed by Ben Richards in Swansea, 1947
Born	(1889-04-26)April 26, 1889 Vienna, Austria
Died	April 29, 1951(1951-04-29) (aged 62) Cambridge, England
Cause of death	Prostate cancer
Resting place	Ascension Parish Burial Ground, Cambridge
Education	PhD (Cantab)
Alma mater	Victoria University of Manchester, University of Cambridge
Occupation(s)	Philosopher, schoolteacher
Known for	Private language argument, language-game, family resemblance, picture theory of language, rule-following paradox
Notable work	Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Parent(s)	Karl Wittgenstein and Leopoldine Kalmus
Relatives	Paul Wittgenstein, brother; Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, sister; Friedrich von Hayek, mother's nephew
Website	The Cambridge Wittgenstein archive

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in the areas of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. He held the position of professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947, preceded by G.E. Moore and followed by G.H. von Wright.

Described by Bertrand Russell as the most perfect example of genius, Wittgenstein inspired two of the century's principal philosophical movements, logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Professional philosophers have ranked his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) numbers one and four respectively in a list of the most important philosophy books of the 20th-century. Peter Hacker writes that 20th-century philosophy would be as unintelligible without Wittgenstein as 20th-century art without Picasso.

Born into one of Europe's wealthiest families in Vienna at the turn of the century—a city and time Bruce Duffy described as a dark hothouse of soil that produced not only Wittgenstein, but also Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl, and Adolf Hitler—he gave away his inheritance, and was at one point reduced to selling his furniture to cover expenses when working on the Tractatus. He was gay long before it was accepted, as was at least one of his brothers, three of whom committed suicide, with Wittgenstein and the remaining brother both contemplating it. He approached philosophy at Cambridge as pointless and almost offensive; he grew angry with students who wanted to pursue it, and himself tried to leave, working as a primary school teacher in Austria, where he found himself in trouble for hitting the children, and during the Second World War as a medical orderly in Guy's Hospital. He famously embraced G.E. Moore's wife when she told him she was working in a jam factory—doing something useful, in Wittgenstein's eyes.

His work is divided between his early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, the only philosophy book he published in his lifetime, and his later period, articulated in the Investigations. The early Wittgenstein was concerned with the relationship between propositions and the world, and saw the aim of philosophy as nothing more than correcting misconceptions about language. The Tractatus became a leading text of logical atomism, the Vienna Circle, and later logical positivism: logical truths were tautologies and metaphysical claims nonsensical—not wrong, but simply meaningless. The later Wittgenstein rejected many of the conclusions of the Tractatus, and provided a detailed account of the many possible uses of ordinary language, calling language a series of interchangeable language-games in which the meaning of words is derived from their public use; thus there can be no such thing as a private language. Despite these differences, similarities between the early and later periods include a conception of philosophy as a kind of therapy, a concern for ethical and religious themes, and a literary style often described as poetic. Terry Eagleton called him the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists.

Background

The Wittgensteins

Karl Wittgenstein was one of the richest men in the world.

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, to Karl Wittgenstein and Leopoldine Kalmus. He was the youngest of eight children, born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father's parents, Hermann Christian and Fanny Wittgenstein—a first cousin of the famous violinist Joseph Joachim—were both born into Jewish families but later converted to Protestantism, and after they moved from Saxony to Vienna in the 1850s, assimilated into the Viennese Protestant professional classes.

Karl Wittgenstein became an industrialist and went on to make his fortune in iron and steel, and by the late 1880s was one of the richest men in the world, controlling an effective monopoly on steel and iron resources within the empire. Eventually he transferred much of his capital into real estate, shares of stocks, precious metals, and foreign currency reserves, which were spread across Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands and North America, which insulated the family's colossal wealth from the inflation crises that followed. Wittgenstein's mother, Leopoldine, was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich von Hayek on her maternal side. Despite their paternal grandparents' conversion to Protestantism, the Wittgenstein children were baptized as Roman Catholics.

Early life

The Wittgensteins around 1890: from left, Helene, Rudi, Hermine, Ludwig, Gretl, Paul, Hans, and Kurt

Wittgenstein grew up in a household that provided an exceptionally intense environment for artistic and intellectual achievement. He had three sisters—Hermine (the first born), Margaret, known as "Gretl," and Helene—and four brothers—Hans, Kurt, Rudolf (Rudi), and Paul, who became a well-known concert pianist despite losing an arm in the war. Wittgenstein was the youngest of the children.

The father was a leading patron of the arts, commissioning works by Auguste Rodin and fully financing the Vienna Secession Building, and the family were well-known members of Vienna's cultured and aristocratic class. Gustav Klimt painted Gretl for her wedding portrait. Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, Clara Schumann, and Pablo Casals gave concerts in the family's home; Brahms gave two of the sisters piano lessons. The Wittgensteins' summer house, Hochreith in lower Austria, was built by Josef Hoffmann, and Gretl's apartment was decorated by Kolo Moser.

One of the family's music rooms.

Despite its good fortune, the Wittgensteins had a strong streak of clinical depression running through it, or what Anthony Gottlieb called bad temper and extreme nervous tension. He tells a story about Paul practicing one day on one of the family's seven grand pianos. He leapt up and shouted at Wittgenstein in the next room: "I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!"

Three of the brothers ended up committing suicide. The eldest, Hans—who started composing at age four—killed himself in April 1902 in Havana, Cuba. Rudi followed in May 1903: aged 22 and studying chemistry at the Berlin Academy, he walked into a bar, asked the pianist to play Thomas Koschat's "Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich," then mixed himself a drink of milk and potassium cyanide, dying in agony. Gottlieb writes that his suicide note said he was grieving over the death of a friend, but it was more likely that he was worried about what he called his "perverted disposition." He had looked for help from the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which campaigned against Section 175 of the German Criminal Code forbidding unnatural sexual acts. The organization published an annual report, including a case study that Rudi feared identified him as the subject. His father forbade the family from mentioning his name ever again.

Kurt shot himself at the end of the First World War, when the Austrian troops he was commanding deserted en masse in October 1918. Gottlieb writes that Hermine had said Kurt seemed to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself." Wittgenstein himself considered suicide, as did Paul.

Michael Fitzgerald, a psychiatrist in Dublin, argues that Karl Wittgenstein lacked empathy and was a harsh perfectionist, and that Wittgenstein's mother was anxious and insecure and unable to stand up to him. Wittgenstein himself, in the view of Fitzgerald and Swedish psychiatrist Christopher Gillberg, showed several of the major features of Asperger's Syndrome, including perfectionism, obsessive interests, difficulty at school, especially with spelling, but able to perform mathematical calculations and give lectures without notes. German psychiatrist Sula Wolff suggested a more accurate diagnosis might be schizoid personality disorder.

Education

1903: Realschule in Linz

File:WittRealschuleCrop.jpg

Adolf Hitler (top right) at the Leonding Realschule. There is no consensus that the boy on the left is Wittgenstein, though they were at the school at the same.

Until 1903, Wittgenstein was educated by private tutors at home, after which he began three years of schooling at the Realschule in Leonding, near Linz. Adolf Hitler, born six days before Wittgenstein, was also a student there, but two grades below him. Ray Monk, one of Wittgenstein's biographers, writes that the boys were both there during the school year 1904–1905, but there is disagreement about whether they would have known one another. Historian Brigitte Hamann writes in her Hitler's Vienna (1999) that Hitler was bound at least to have laid eyes on Wittgenstein, because the latter was so conspicuous, though she told Focus magazine a year earlier that they were in different classes and would have had nothing to do with one another. She also told Focus that the photograph of Hitler (see right) stems from 1900 or 1901, before Wittgenstein arrived at the school.

Hitler referred in Mein Kampf to a Jewish boy at the school, but there were 17 Jews in the school at the time and it is not known whether he had Wittgenstein in mind: "At the Realschule, to be sure, I did meet one Jewish boy who was treated by all of us with caution ... but neither I nor the others had any thoughts on the matter."

Hamann writes that Wittgenstein's first impression of the school—recorded in his notebook—was "Crap!" (Mist!), that he stood out from the other boys, and was to some extent bullied. He spoke an unusually pure form of High German with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable, addressing all but one of his schoolmates with the formal "Sie," and insisting they do the same and call him Herr Ludwig. He was often absent and did not do well at the school; Harmann writes that when he went to university in Berlin in 1906, his spelling was little better than Hitler's. He received an A only twice, both times in religious studies. The rest of his grades were usually C or D, sometimes a B and once an E. The other boys made fun of him, singing after him: "Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts" ("Wittgenstein wends his woeful windy way towards Vienna"). He said he felt "betrayed and sold" by his schoolmates.

1906: Engineering in Berlin and Manchester

In 1906 he began studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, and after graduating in 1908 he went to the Victoria University of Manchester to do his doctorate, full of plans for aeronautical projects. At Manchester he conducted research into the behavior of kites in the upper atmosphere, experimenting at a meteorological observation states near Glossop. He also worked on the design of a propeller with small jet engines on the end of its blades, something he patented in 1911 and which earned him a research studentship from the university. It was around this time that he became interested in the foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica (1910), and Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, vol. 1 (1893) and vol. 2 (1903). In the summer of 1911 he visited Frege in Jena. He wrote:

I was shown into Frege's study. Frege was a small, neat man with a pointed beard who bounced around the room as he talked. He absolutely wiped the dloor with me, and I felt very depressed; but at the end he said "You must come again," so I cheered up. I had several discussions with him after that. Frege would never talk about anything but logic and mathematics, if I started on some other subject, he would say something polite and then plunge back into logic and mathematics.

1911: Arrival at Cambridge

In 1911 Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in Trinity.

Wittgenstein wanted to study with Frege, but Frege suggested he attend the University of Cambridge to study under Russell, so in October 1911 Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in Trinity College. He was soon not only attending Russell's lectures, but dominating them, then following Russell back to his rooms at four or five in the evening to discuss more philosophy until Hall. Russell was irritated by him; he wrote to his lover Lady Ottoline Morrell: "My German friend threatens to be an infliction."

He revised his opinion, and in fact came to be overpowered by Wittgenstein's forceful personality. He wrote in November 1911 that he had at first thought Wittgenstein might be a crank, but soon decided he was a genius: "Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: 'There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced." His opinion of Wittgenstein became such that he wrote in 1916, after Wittgenstein had criticized his own work: "I saw that he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy."

In 1912 Wittgenstein joined the Moral Sciences Club, a discussion group for philosophy dons and students, and delivered his first paper there on 29 November 1912. Fifteen members were there, including G.E. Moore. The minutes record:

Mr Wittgenstein ... read a paper entitled "What is Philosophy?" The paper lasted only about 4 minutes, thus cutting the previous record established by Mr Tye by nearly two minutes. Philosophy was defined as all those primitive propositions which are assumed as true without proof by the various sciences. This defn. was much discussed but there was no general disposition to adopt it. The discussion was kept very well to the point, and the Chairman did not find it necessary to intervene much.

Lytton Strachey said of Wittgenstein: "The latter oh! so bright—but quelle souffrance! Oh God! God! ... How shall I manage to slink off to bed?"

John Maynard Keynes invited Wittgenstein to join the Cambridge Apostles, an elite secret society formed in 1820 that Russell and Moore had belonged to as students. Wittgenstein was adopted as an "embryo," a potential member, with Russell reportedly objecting to his membership, thinking Wittgenstein would not enjoy the membership's affectation. Wittgenstein did join, but did not enjoy the meetings. Lytton Strachey wrote to Keynes on 17 May 1912 about an Apostles meeting Wittgenstein had attended, calling him Herr Sinckel-Winckel:

Oliver and Herr Sinckel-Winckel hard at it on universals and particulars. The latter oh! so bright—but quelle souffrance! Oh God! God! "If A loves B"—"There may be a common quality"—"Not analysable that way at all, but the complexes have certain qualities." How shall I manage to slink off to bed?

It was Russell who introduced Wittgenstein to David Pinsent, a mathematics undergraduate and descendant of David Hume, who became what Wittgenstein called his first and only friend. They worked together on experiments in the psychology laboratory involving the role of rhythm in the appreciation of music, and Wittgenstein delivered a paper about it to the British Psychological Association in Cambridge in 1912. Wittgenstein and Pinsent travelled a lot together, including to Norway and Iceland, and Wittgenstein later dedicated the Tractatus to him. When Pinsent died in a plane crash in May 1918, Wittgenstein was distraught to the point of suicidal.

Karl Wittgenstein died in 1913, and on receiving his inheritance, Wittgenstein became one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He donated some of it, initially anonymously, to Austrian artists and writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. In 1914, he went to visit Trakl, when the latter wanted to meet his benefactor, but Trakl died in an apparent suicide days before Wittgenstein arrived. This is the second instance, after Ludwig Boltzmann in 1906, of someone committing suicide just when Wittgenstein wanted to meet them.

Although invigorated by his study in Cambridge and his conversations with Russell, Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by other academics. In 1913, he retreated to the remote village of Skjolden in Norway, where he rented the second floor of a house for the winter. The isolation allowed him to devote himself entirely to his work, and he later saw this period as one of the most productive of his life, writing Logik, the predecessor of much of the Tractatus.

1914–1918: World War I

Military service

The 1914 notes on display at Trinity College, Cambridge

The outbreak of World War I the next year left him in deep shock. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, first serving on a ship and then in an artillery workshop. In March 1916, he was posted to a fighting unit on the front line of the Russian front, as part of the Austrian 7th Army, where his unit was involved in some of the heaviest fighting, defending against the Brusilov Offensive. In action against British troops, he was decorated with the Military Merit with Swords on the Ribbon, and was commended by the army for "courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism." In January 1917, he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won several medals for bravery including the Silver Medal for Valour. In 1918 he was promoted to reserve officer (lieutenant) and sent to northern Italy as part of an artillery regiment. For his part in the Austrian offensive of June 1918, he was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, the highest honour in the Austrian army, but was instead awarded the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords.

Throughout the war, he kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical reflections alongside personal remarks, and in them he records his contempt for the baseness of soldiers in wartime. He discovered Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Galicia, and carried it everywhere, recommending it to anyone in distress to the point where he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels".

Publication of the Tractatus

On leave in the summer of 1918, he received a letter from David Pinsent's mother telling him that Pinsent had been killed in an airplane accident on 8 May. Suicidal, Wittgenstein went to stay with his uncle Paul, and there completed the Tractatus, which he dedicated to Pinsent. The book was sent to publishers, but without success. In October 1918, he returned to the Italian front but was captured by the Italians shortly thereafter. Through the intervention of Russell and Keynes, he managed to get access to books, prepare his manuscript, and send it back to England. Russell saw it as a work of supreme philosophical importance and worked with Wittgenstein to get it published after his release in 1919. He wrote an introduction, lending the book his reputation, though Wittgenstein had become personally disaffected with Russell and thought the introduction evinced a fundamental misunderstanding of the Tractatus.

It first appeared in German in 1921 as "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung," published as part of Wilhelm Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, though Wittgenstein was not happy with the end result and called it a pirate edition. An English translation was prepared by |Frank Ramsey, a mathematics undergraduate at King's commissioned by C. K. Ogden. After some discussion of how best to translate the German title, Moore suggested Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Difficulties remained in finding a publisher, in part because Wittgenstein wanted it to appear without Russell's introduction; Cambridge University Press turned it down for that reason. Finally in 1922 Routledge & Kegan Paul agreed to print a bilingual edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation.

1920: Teaching in Austria

"At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. "So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate."

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.371–6.372

Wittgenstein in 1920, second right, between his sister, Helene Salzer, and his Swedish friend, Arvid Sjögren

By 1920, Wittgenstein was a profoundly changed man. He had faced harrowing combat in World War I, and crystallized his intellectual and emotional upheavals with the exhausting composition of the Tractatus. Because he believed it offered a definitive solution to all the problems of philosophy, he decided to leave for Austria to work as a primary school teacher, where he worked in several schools in Hassbach, Otterthal, and Trattenbach. He was unhappy, writing to Russell in October 1921:

I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.

Frank Ramsey, the translator of the Tractatus, went to visit him in the fall of 1923 and wrote in a letter home that Wittgenstein was living very economically, in one tiny whitewashed room that only had space for a bed, washstand, a small table, and one small hard chair. Ramsey shared an evening meal with him of coarse bread, butter, and cocoa. His school hours were eight to twelve or one, and he had afternoons free.

While there Wittgenstein wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for the children, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, the only book of his apart from the Tractatus that was published in his lifetime. It was published in Vienna in 1926, minus an introduction he wrote for it, by Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky; a first edition sold for £75,000 in 2005. He ran into trouble with the school because he struck the children, and this, together with a general suspicion among the villagers that he was mad, led to a long series of bitter disagreements with some of the children's parents. It culminated in April 1926 when he hit an 11-year-old boy so hard on the head that the child collapsed. The boy's father tried to have Wittgenstein arrested; he was cleared of misconduct, but resigned his position and returned to Vienna, where he worked as a gardener's assistant in the monastery of the Brothers of Mercy in Hütteldorf.

1926: Stonborough House

Stonborough House was designed and built by Wittgenstein between 1926 and 1928.

"I am not interested in erecting a building, but in ... presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings."

—Wittgenstein

In 1926, Wittgenstein was invited by his sister Gretl to work on the design of her new house. The architect was Paul Engelmann, who had become his friend during the war, when they spent a lot of time in each other's company in the trenches. Engelmann designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos. Wittgenstein poured himself into the project, focusing on the windows, doors, and radiators. It took him a year to design the door handles, and another to design the radiators. Each window was covered by a metal screen that weighed 150kg, moved by a pulley Wittgenstein designed. Bernhard Leitner, author of The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, said of it that there is barely anything comparable in the history of interior design: "It is as ingenious as it is expensive. A metal curtain that could be lowered into the floor." When the house was nearly finished he had a ceiling raised 30mm so that he had the exact proportions he wanted.

Ludwig's eldest sister, Hermine, wrote of the house that even though she admired it: "I always knew that I neither wanted to, nor could, live in it myself. It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods." Wittgenstein himself found the house too austere, saying it had good manners, but no primordial life and no health. After the war it became a barracks and stables for Russian soldiers, and in the 1950s Gretl's son sold it to a developer. The Vienna Landmark Commission saved it and made it a national monument in 1971, and it now houses the cultural department of the Bulgarian Embassy.

Vienna Circle

Ludwig's sister Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein ("Gretl"), painted by Gustav Klimt for her wedding portrait, 1905

Toward the end of his work on the house, Wittgenstein was contacted by Moritz Schlick, one of the leading figures of the newly formed Vienna Circle. The Tractatus had been tremendously influential in the development of Viennese positivism and, although Schlick never succeeded in drawing Wittgenstein into the discussions of the Vienna Circle itself, he and some of his fellow circle members, especially Friedrich Waismann, met occasionally with Wittgenstein to discuss philosophical topics. Wittgenstein was frequently frustrated by these meetings—he believed that Schlick and his colleagues had fundamentally misunderstood the Tractatus. Many of the disagreements concerned the importance of religious life and the mystical; Wittgenstein considered these matters as a sort of wordless faith, whereas the positivists disdained them as useless. In one meeting, Wittgenstein went so far as to refuse to discuss the book at all, and sat with his back to his guests sulking, while he read aloud from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, much to the vexation of his guests. Nevertheless, the contact with the Vienna Circle stimulated Wittgenstein intellectually and revived his interest in philosophy. In the course of his conversations with the Vienna Circle and Frank Ramsey, who travelled from Cambridge to Austria to discuss the Tractatus, Wittgenstein began to think that there might be some mistakes in his work.

Personal relationships and politics

Although Wittgenstein was involved in a relationship with Marguerite Respinger (a young Swiss woman he had met as a friend of the family), his plans to marry her were broken off in 1931 and he never married. Most of his romantic attachments were to young men. There is considerable debate over how active Wittgenstein's homosexual life was, inspired by the American philosopher William Warren Bartley's biography, Wittgenstein (1973), in which material was presented alleging that Wittgenstein had several casual liaisons with young men in the Wiener Prater park during his time in Vienna; Bartley said he had discovered two coded notebooks unknown to Wittgenstein's executors that detailed the visits to the Prater. Wittgenstein's estate and other biographers disputed Bartley's claims and asked him to produce his sources. What became clear is that Wittgenstein had several long-term attachments with men, including relationships with David Pinsent, Francis Skinner, and Ben Richards.

Although some commentators have assumed that Wittgenstein's political sympathies lay on the left, and while, despite being entirely contemptuous of Marx's philosophical work, he once described himself as a "communist at heart" and romanticized the life of laborers, in many ways he was a reactionary. He abhorred the idea of scientific progress, because it was meaningless without moral progress, was conservative in his musical tastes, and was ambivalent about the invention of nuclear weapons, stating that "the people making speeches against producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of the intellectuals, although even this does not prove beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed". He particularly admired the philosophy of the Austrian Otto Weininger. Wittgenstein distributed copies of Weininger's theories to bemused colleagues at Cambridge. Like Weininger, Wittgenstein had a troubled relationship towards his ethnicity and sexuality. In his notebooks of the early 1930s, in particular MS 154, he berated himself for being a "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" thinker, and attributed this to his own Jewish and diasporadic sense of identity, writing: "The saint is the only Jewish genius. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance)". While Wittgenstein would later say that his thoughts are "100% Hebraic," as Hans Sluga has argued, "his was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in Weininger's case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius."

In 1934, attracted by Maynard Keynes's description of Soviet life in Short View of Russia, he conceived the idea of emigrating to the Soviet Union with Francis Skinner. They took lessons in Russian and in 1935 Wittgenstein traveled to Leningrad and Moscow to look for a job. He was offered teaching positions but preferred manual work and returned three weeks later.

1929–1947: Return to Cambridge

PhD and fellowship

At the urging of Ramsey and others, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929. He was met at the railway station by a crowd of England's greatest intellectuals, discovering rather to his horror that he was one of the most famed philosophers in the world. Keynes wrote in a letter to his wife: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train." Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge as he did not have a degree, so he applied as an advanced undergraduate. Russell noted that his previous residency was sufficient for a PhD, and urged him to offer the Tractatus as his thesis. It was examined in 1929 by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defence, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." Moore wrote in the examiner's report: "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree." Wittgenstein was appointed as a lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College.

1938: Anschluss

From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, where he worked on the Philosophical Investigations. In the winter of 1936/37, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most of them about minor infractions like white lies, in an effort to cleanse himself. In 1938, he traveled to Ireland to visit Maurice Drury, a friend who was training as a doctor, and considered such training himself, with the intention of abandoning philosophy for psychiatry. The visit to Ireland was at the same time a response to the invitation of the then Irish Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, himself a mathematics teacher. De Valera hoped that Wittgenstein's presence would contribute to an academy for advanced mathematics.

While he was in Ireland in March 1938, Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss; the Viennese Wittgenstein was now a citizen of the enlarged Germany and a Jew under its racial laws. He and his siblings had been raised as Christians, but they were Jews under the Nuremberg racial laws, because three of their grandparents had been born as Jews and had converted to Christianity only as adults. Wittgenstein found this intolerable and started to investigate the possibility of acquiring British or Irish citizenship with the help of Keynes. A few days before the invasion of Poland, Hitler granted Mischling (Jewish-Aryan half-breed) status to the Wittgenstein children. In 1939 there were 2,100 applications for this, and Hitler granted only 12. Anthony Gottlieb writes that the pretext was that their paternal grandfather had been the bastard son of a German prince, which allowed the Reichsbank to claim the gold, foreign currency, and stocks held in Switzerland by a Wittgenstein trust. Gretl, an American citizen by marriage, was the one who started the negotiations over the racial status of their grandfather, and the family's foreign currency was used as a bargaining tool. Paul had escaped to Switzerland and then the United States in July 1938, and disagreed with the negotiations, leading to a permanent split between the siblings. After the war, when Paul was performing in Vienna, he did not visit Hermine who was dying there, and he had no further contact with Ludwig or Gretl.

1939: Professorship

In the summer of 1937, Wittgenstein had been introduced to Alan Turing by Alister Watson. After G. E. Moore's resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein, who was by then considered a philosophical genius, was appointed to the chair in Philosophy at Cambridge. He acquired British citizenship soon afterwards, and in July 1939 he traveled to Vienna to assist Gretl and his other sisters, visiting Berlin for one day to meet with an official of the Reichsbank. After this, he traveled to New York to persuade Paul, whose agreement was required, to back the scheme. The required Befreiung was granted in August 1939. The unknown amount signed over to the Nazis by the Wittgenstein family, a week or so before the outbreak of war, included amongst many other assets 1.7 tonnes of gold. At 2009 prices, this amount of gold alone would be worth in excess of US$60 million. There is also a report that Wittgenstein went on to visit Moscow a second time in 1939, travelling from Berlin, and again met the philosopher Sophia Janowskaya.

After work, Wittgenstein would often relax by watching Westerns, where he preferred to sit at the very front of the cinema, or reading detective stories. Norman Malcolm wrote that he would rush to the cinema when class ended. "As the members of the class began to move their chairs out of the room he might look imploringly at a friend and say in a low tone, ‘Could you go to a flick?’ On the way to the cinema Wittgenstein would buy a bun or cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film."

By this time, Wittgenstein's view on the foundations of mathematics had changed considerably. Earlier he had thought that logic could provide a solid foundation, and he had even considered updating Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Now he denied that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and he denied that mathematical statements were true in any real sense. He gave a series of lectures on mathematics, discussing this and other topics, documented in a book, with lectures by Wittgenstein and discussions between him and several students, including the young Alan Turing.

World War II

During World War II, he left Cambridge and volunteered as a hospital porter in Guy's Hospital in London and as a laboratory assistant in Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary. This was arranged by his friend John Ryle, a brother of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who was then working at the hospital. After the war, Wittgenstein returned to teach at Cambridge, but he found teaching an increasing burden: he had never liked the intellectual atmosphere at Cambridge, and in fact encouraged several of his students, including Skinner, to find work outside of academic philosophy. There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, that if any of his philosophy students expressed an interest in pursuing the subject, he would ban them from attending any more of his classes.

1947–1951: Final years and death

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits."

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431

He resigned his position at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing. He was succeeded as professor by his friend Georg Henrik von Wright. He stayed at Kilpatrick House guesthouse in East Wicklow in 1947 and 1948. Much of his later work was done on the west coast of Ireland in the rural isolation he preferred with Patrick Lynch. By 1949, when he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer, he had written most of the material that would be published after his death as Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations).

Wittgenstein's grave at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground, Cambridge

He spent the last two years of his life in Vienna, the United States, Oxford, and Cambridge, where he worked continuously on new material, inspired by the conversations that he had had with his friend and former student Norman Malcolm during a summer spent at the Malcolms' house in the United States. Malcolm had been wrestling with G.E. Moore's common sense response to external world skepticism ("Here is one hand, and here is another; therefore I know at least two external things exist"). Wittgenstein spent the last eighteen months of his life writing his Remarks on Colour, inspired by Goethe's Theory of Colours. In it, he "examines the features of different colours (metallic colour, the colours of flames, etc.) and of luminosity, a theme Wittgenstein treats in such a way as to destroy the traditional idea that colour is a simple and logically uniform kind of thing.

In the days before his death, He began to work on another series of remarks inspired by his conversations, published posthumously as On Certainty. He wrote the final entry, in manuscript MS 177, less than a day before he completely lost consciousness. His last words, reported by the wife of his doctor in whose home he spent his last days, were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life". He was buried at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Work

The Tractatus (1921)

Main article: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–1930), a mathematics undergraduate, was under 18 years old when he translated the Tractatus.

Apart from the 1926 dictionary for schoolchildren in Austria, the Tratactus was the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. Russell wrote an introduction for it, but Wittgenstein was not happy with it. The work was first published without the introduction in Germany in 1921, as Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, part of Wilhelm Ostwald's Annalen der Naturphilosophie, but Wittgenstein saw the editing as slovenly and called it a "Raubdruck" (pirate publication). He submitted it to Cambridge University Press without the Russell introduction, but they rejected it for that reason. Several other publishers also turned it down, but Routledge and Kegan Paul accepted it for publication in 1922—with the introduction—with a translation by Frank P. Ramsey commissioned by C. K. Ogden.

This is the translation that was approved by Wittgenstein, but it is problematic in a number of ways. Wittgenstein's English was poor at the time, and Ramsey was a teenager, a mathematics undergraduate, who had only recently learned German. For example, "Sachverhalt" and "Sachlage" are translated as "atomic fact" and "state of affairs" respectively. But Wittgenstein discusses non-existent "Sachverhalten," and there cannot be a non-existent fact. In a later translation (1961), David Pears and Brian McGuinness made a number of changes, including translating "Sachverhalt" as "state of affairs" and "Sachlage" as "situation." The new translation is often preferred, but some philosophers use the original, in part because Wittgenstein approved it, and because it avoids the idiomatic English of Pears-McGuinness.

The book is 75 pages long, and presents seven numbered propositions (1–7), with sub-levels elaborating on the basic propositions (1, 1.1, 1.11):

1. Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist.

   Ramsey-Ogden: The world is everything that is the case.

   Pears-McGuinness: The world is all that is the case.

2. Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.

   Ramsey-Ogden: What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

   Pears-McGuinness: What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.

3. Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.

   Ramsey-Ogden: The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

   Pears-McGuinness: A logical picture of facts is a thought.

4. Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz.

   Ramsey-Ogden: The thought is the significant proposition.

   Pears-McGuinness: A thought is a proposition with a sense.

5. Der Satz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze.

   Ramsey-Ogden: Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.

   Pears-McGuinness: A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.

6. Die allgemeine Form der Wahrheitsfunktion ist: $[{\bar {p}},{\bar {\xi }},N({\bar {\xi }})]$. Dies ist die allgemeine Form des Satzes.

   Ramsey-Ogden: The general form of truth-function is: $[{\bar {p}},{\bar {\xi }},N({\bar {\xi }})]$. This is the general form of proposition.

   Pears-McGuinness: The general form of a truth-function is: $[{\bar {p}},{\bar {\xi }},N({\bar {\xi }})]$. This is the general form of a proposition.

7. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

   Ramsey-Ogden: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

   Pears-McGuinness: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

"The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by prop[osition]s—i.e. by language—(and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what can not be expressed by pro[position]s, but only shown (gezeigt); which I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy."

— Wittgenstein, letter to Russell, 19 August 1919.

The Tractatus presents the idea of logical atomism and the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein argues that the world consists of facts, not objects—the world is the totality of facts, not of things (1.1)—and that our experience of it can be reduced to a set of atomic facts that can be analyzed no further. The obtaining of a state of affairs is a fact. A representation of a state of affairs is a model or picture; the totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world (3.01).

Thus, propositions are logical pictures, which may be true or false, just as a state of affairs obtains or does not obtain. Language makes claims about the world only when there is something in common between propositions and what they picture. A statement that cannot be reduced to atomic facts is meaningless, or nonsense.

The truths of metaphysics, ethics, religion, and aesthetics are ineffable; they can be shown but not said. For Wittgenstein, the job of the philosopher is simply to monitor the bounds of sense. He wrote in the preface: "The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)." Because the limit can only be drawn in language, what lies beyond it is nonsense. The Tractatus itself is constructed of pseudo-propositions, as Wittgenstein acknowledges:

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.

Intermediate works

Wittgenstein wrote copiously after his return to Cambridge, and arranged much of his writing into an array of incomplete manuscripts. Some thirty thousand pages existed at the time of his death. Much, but by no means all, of this has been sorted and released in several volumes. During his "middle work" in the 1920s and 1930s, much of his work involved attacks from various angles on the sort of philosophical perfectionism embodied in the Tractatus. Of this work, Wittgenstein published only a single paper, "Remarks on Logical Form," which was submitted to be read to the Aristotelian Society and published in their proceedings. By the time of the conference, however, Wittgenstein had repudiated the essay as worthless, and gave a talk on the concept of infinity instead, but he was too late to prevent the publication and requested that the synopsis be omitted from the synoptic index of the journal that came out in 1954.

Wittgenstein was increasingly frustrated to find that, although he was not yet ready to publish his work, some other philosophers were beginning to publish essays containing inaccurate representations of his own views, based on their conversations with him. As a result, he published a very brief letter to the journal Mind, taking a recent article by Richard Braithwaite as a case in point, and asked philosophers to hold off writing about his views until he was himself ready to publish them.

Philosophical Investigations

Main article: Philosophical Investigations

Illustration of a "duckrabbit", discussed in Section XI Part II, Philosophical Investigations

Although unpublished during his lifetime, the Blue Book, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contains seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language—later developed in the Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen)—and is widely read today as a turning-point in his philosophy of language.

The Philosophical Investigations (PI) was published in two parts in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death. Most of the 693 numbered paragraphs in Part I were ready for printing in 1946, but Wittgenstein withdrew the manuscript from the publisher. The shorter Part II was added by the editors, G.E.M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees.

It is difficult to find consensus among interpreters of Wittgenstein's work, and this is particularly true in the case of the Investigations. Wittgenstein asks the reader to think of language and its uses as a multiplicity of language-games within which the parts of language function and have meaning. From this perspective, many conventional philosophical problems (e.g. what is truth?) become meaningless wordplay.

The conventional view of the task of the philosopher is to solve seemingly intractable problems of philosophy using logical analysis (for example, the problem of free will, the relationship between mind and matter, what the good or the beautiful or the true consist of, the nature of meaning, and so on). However, Wittgenstein argues that these problems are, in fact, "bewitchments" that arise from philosophers' misguided attempts to consider the words' absolute meanings, outside of context, usage, and grammar, as if there were some ultimate abstract foundation for the meaning of a word all by itself. Rather than indulge in this fantasy, one should understand the meanings of words, even abstract, philosophical words, by looking at how the words are used by fluent speakers. The beginning of The Blue Book puts flesh on the late Wittgenstinian project by applying it to the word "meaning" itself:

What is the meaning of a word? Let us attack this question by asking, first,...what does the explanation of a word look like? The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question 'how do we measure a length?' helps us to understand the problem 'what is length?'

In Wittgenstein's view, language is inextricably woven into the fabric of life, and as part of that fabric it works relatively unproblematically. We do not, when speaking ordinarily, worry about how our words mean what they do. Philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home and into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed, specifically for the purpose of "pure" philosophical examination. Wittgenstein describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language (the language of the Tractatus), where all philosophical problems can be solved without the confusing and muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, just because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no actual work at all. There is much talk in the Investigations, then, of "idle wheels" and language being "on holiday" or a mere "ornament", all of which is used to express the idea of what is lacking in philosophical contexts. To resolve the problems encountered there, Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the "rough ground" of ordinary language in use; that is, philosophers must "bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."

In this regard, one can see affinities between Wittgenstein and Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that when concepts grounded in experience are applied outside of the range of possible experience, the result is contradictions and confusion. Thus, the second part of the Critique consists of refutations, typically by reductio ad absurdum, of logical proofs of the existence of God and the existence of souls, and attacks on strong notions of infinity and necessity. In this way, Wittgenstein's objections to applying words outside the contexts in which they have an established meaning mirror Kant's objections to the non-empirical use of empirical reason.

Returning to the rough ground of ordinary uses of words is, however, easier said than done. Philosophical problems have the character of depth and run as deep as the forms of language and thought that set philosophers on the road to confusion. Wittgenstein therefore speaks of "illusions", "bewitchment", and "conjuring tricks" performed on our thinking by our forms of language, and tries to break their spell by attending to differences between superficially similar aspects of language which he feels lead to this type of confusion. For much of the Investigations, then, Wittgenstein tries to show how philosophers are led away from the ordinary world of language in use by misleading aspects of language itself. He does this by looking at the role language plays in the development of various philosophical problems, to some general problems involving language itself, then at the notions of rules and rule following, and then on to some more specific problems in the philosophy of mind. Throughout these investigations, the style of writing is conversational, with Wittgenstein in turn taking the role of the puzzled philosopher (on either or both sides of traditional philosophical debates), and that of the guide attempting to show the puzzled philosopher the "way out of the fly bottle."

Much of the Investigations, then, consists of examples of how philosophical confusion is generated and how, by a close examination of the actual workings of everyday language, the first false steps towards philosophical puzzlement can be avoided. By avoiding these first false steps, philosophical problems themselves simply no longer arise and are therefore dissolved rather than solved. As Wittgenstein puts it, "the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear."

Reception

Both his early and later work have been major influences in the development of analytic philosophy. Former colleagues and students include Gilbert Ryle, Friedrich Waismann, Norman Malcolm, G. E. M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, Georg Henrik von Wright, Peter Geach and the Buddhist scholar K.N. Jayatilleke. Contemporary philosophers influenced by him are too numerous to mention, but they include Cora Diamond, James F. Conant and Stanley Cavell who are associated with the New Wittgenstein. Saul Kripke has published his own interpretation of Philosophical Investigations in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, which came to be dubbed by critics "Kripkenstein".

Some have criticized Wittgenstein for his position on the limits of language, and his abandonment of rigorous stepwise analysis in favor of empirical linguistic description in his later works. His friend Friedrich Waismann, who spent much of the 1930s unsuccessfully attempting to co-author a book with Wittgenstein, accused him of "complete obscurantism" because of his apparent betrayal of logical positivism and empirical inquiry, a criticism that was developed by Ernest Gellner.

He was influential outside philosophy too. Patrick Lynch's thinking as an economist was affected by Wittgenstein's visits to Ireland and the holidays they spent in the west of the country. Psychologists and psychotherapists inspired by Wittgenstein's work include Fred Newman, Lois Holzman, Brian J. Mistler, and John Morss. American anthropologist Clifford Geertz grounded his development of linguistic symbolism in Wittgenstein's work, while the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, said that "Wittgenstein is probably the philosopher who has helped me most at moments of difficulty. He's a kind of saviour for times of great intellectual distress". The writings and art work of conceptual artist, Joseph Kosuth, is heavily influenced by Wittgensteinian thought. American composer Steve Reich has twice set quotes from Wittgenstein to music. "How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!" is the basis for Proverb (1995), while the third movement of You Are (Variations) (2004), uses a sentence from Philosophical Investigations: "Explanations come to an end somewhere." Elizabeth Lutyens set parts of the Tractatus to music in 1951. A movie about Wittgenstein's life was made by Derek Jarman with a script by Terry Eagleton in 1993. The only known fragment of music composed by Wittgenstein was premiered in November 2003; it comprises four bars and lasts less than half a minute.

Works

A collection of Ludwig Wittgenstein's manuscripts is held by Trinity College, Cambridge.

• Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14 (1921)
  • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by C.K. Ogden (1922)
• Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953)
  • Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (1953)
• Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, ed. by G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe (1956), a selection of his work on the philosophy of logic and mathematics between 1937 and 1944.
  • Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, rev. ed. (1978)
• Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (1980)
  • Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vols. 1 and 2, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (1980), a selection of which makes up Zettel.
• The Blue and Brown Books (1958), notes dictated in English to Cambridge students in 1933–1935.
• Philosophische Bemerkungen, ed. by Rush Rhees (1964)
  • Philosophical Remarks (1975)
  • Philosophical Grammar (1978)
• Bemerkungen über die Farben, ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe (1977)
  • Remarks on Colour (1991), remarks on Goethe's Theory of Colours.
• On Certainty, collection of aphorisms discussing the relation between knowledge and certainty, extremely influential in the philosophy of action.
• Culture and Value, collection of personal remarks about various cultural issues, such as religion and music, as well as critique of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy.
• Zettel, collection of Wittgenstein's thoughts in fragmentary/"diary entry" format as with On Certainty and Culture and Value.

Works online

• Review of P. Coffey's Science of Logic (1913): a polemical book review, written in 1912 for the March 1913 issue of The Cambridge Review when Wittgenstein was an undergraduate studying with Russell. The review is the earliest public record of Wittgenstein's philosophical views.
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922/1923), German text and Ogden-Ramsey translation
• Wittgenstein Source: 5 000 pages of the Wittgenstein Nachlass online
• Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein at Project Gutenberg
• Google Edition of Remarks on Colour
• Some Remarks on Logical Form
• Cambridge (1932–3) lecture notes
• The Blue Book
• Lecture on Ethics
• On Certainty

References (books)

• Bartley, William Warren. Wittgenstein. Open Court, 1985.
• Barrett, Cyril. Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief. Blackwell, 1991.
• Beaney, Michael (ed.). The Frege Reader. Blackwell, 1997.
• Braithwaite, R.B. "George Edward Moore, 1873 - 1958", in Alice Ambrose and Morris Lazerowitz. (eds.). G.E. Moore: Essays in Retrospect. Allen & Unwin, 1970.
• Cohen, M. Philosophical Tales. Blackwell, 2008.
• Diamond, Cora (ed.). Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. University Of Chicago Press, 1989.
• Creegan, Charles. Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical Method. Routledge, 1989.
• Drury, Maurice O'Connor et al. The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
• Drury, Maurice O'Connor. "Conversations with Wittgenstein," in Rush Rhees (ed.). Recollections of Wittgenstein: Hermine Wittgenstein--Fania Pascal--F.R. Leavis--John King--M. O'C. Drury. Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Edmonds, David and Eidinow, John. Wittgenstein's Poker. Ecco, 2001.
• Edwards, James C. Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life. University Presses of Florida, 1982.
• Gellner, Ernest. Words and Things. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, originally published 1959.
• Goldstein, Laurence. Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and his Relevance to Modern Thought. Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
• Hamann, Brigitte and Thornton, Thomas. Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship. Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Hodges, A. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. Unwin, 1985.
• Kanterian, Edward. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Reaktion Books, 2007.
• Klagge, James Carl. Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Klagge, James Carl and Nordmann, Alfred (eds.). Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
• Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein on rules and private language: an elementary exposition. Harvard University Press, 1982.
• Leitner, Bernhard. The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Documentation. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1973.
• Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford University Press, 1958.
• McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein: A Life : Young Ludwig 1889-1921. University of California Press, 1988.
• Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Free Press, Maxwell Macmillan International, 1990.
• Nedo, Michael and Ranchetti, Michele (eds.). Ludwig Wittgenstein: sein Leben in Bildern und Texten. Suhrkamp, 1983.
• Perloff, Margorie. Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Peterman, James F. Philosophy as therapy. SUNY Press, 1992.
• Russell, Bertrand. Autobiography. Routledge, 1998.
• Russell, Bertrand. "Introduction", Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, May 1922.
• Shanker, S., & Shanker, V. A. (eds.). Ludwig Wittgenstein: Critical Assessments. Croom Helm, 1986.
• Sluga, Hans D. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Waugh, Alexander. The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. Random House of Canada, 2010.
• Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge University Press, first published 1910.

Further reading

• Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. Blackwell, 1980.
• Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar, and Necessity. Blackwell, 1985.
• Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind. Blackwell, 1990.
• Brockhaus, Richard R. Pulling Up the Ladder: The Metaphysical Roots of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Open Court, 1990.
• Fonteneau, Françoise. L’éthique du silence. Wittgenstein et Lacan. Seuil, 1999.
• Glock, Hans-Johann. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Blackwell, 1996.
• Grayling, A.C. Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Guetti, James. Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience. University of Georgia Press, 1993.
• Hacker, P.M.S.. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Clarendon Press, 1986.
• Hacker, P.M.S. "Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann," in Ted Honderich (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy. Blackwell, 1996.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Wittgenstein: Mind and Will. Blackwell, 1996.
• Harré, Rom and Tissaw, Michael A. Wittgenstein and Psychology: A Practical Guide. Ashgate, 2005.
• Kitching, Gavin. Wittgenstein and Society: Essays in Conceptual Puzzlement. Ashgate, 2003.
• McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
• Monk, Ray. How To Read Wittgenstein. Norton, 2005.
• Nieli, Russell. Wittgenstein: from mysticism to ordinary language. SUNY Press, 1987.
• Pears, David. The False Prison, A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy, Volumes 1 and 2. Oxford University Press, 1987 and 1988.
• Sterrett, Susan G. Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World. Pi Press, 2005.

Works referencing Wittgenstein

• Doxiadis, Apostolos and Papadimitriou, Christos. Logicomix, a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and his relationships.
• Doctorow, E.L. City of God. Plume, 2001, depicts an imaginary rivalry between Wittgenstein and Einstein.
• Duffy, Bruce. The World as I Found It. Ticknor & Fields, 1987, a recreation of Wittgenstein's life.
• Jarman, Derek. Wittgenstein, 1993, a biopic of Wittgenstein with a script by Terry Eagleton (published by the British Film Institute, 1993).
• Jormakka, Kari. "The Fifth Wittgenstein", Datutop 24, 2004, a discussion of the connection between Wittgenstein's architecture and his philosophy.
• Kerr, Philip. A Philosophical Investigation, Chatto & Windus, 1992, a dystopian thriller set in 2012.
• Markson, David. Wittgenstein's Mistress. Dalkey Archive Press, 1988, an experimental novel, a first-person account of what it would be like to live in the world of the Tractatus.
• Scheman, Naomi and O'Connor, Peg (eds.). Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Penn State Press, 2002.
• Wijdeveld, Paul. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect. MIT Press, 1994.
• Wallace, David Foster. The Broom of the System. Penguin Books, 1987, a novel.

External links

• Wittgenstein News
• Wittgenstein Source
• The Wittgenstein Portal
• Wittgenstein Links
• Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Ludwig Wittgenstein". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• New York Review of Books Wittgenstein supplement (1969)
• The Guardian series on Wittgenstein (2010)
• Simply Wittgenstein
• Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen
• British Wittgenstein Society's Annotated Wittgenstein Bibliography
• Interview with David Pears on Wittgenstein's life and thought