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Wittgenstein: Biography & Bibliography

Biography

Ludwig Wittgenstein (born April 26, 1889, Vienna) first studied aeronautical engineering in Berlin and Manchester before, on Gottlob Frege’s advice, turning to philosophy via mathematics and logic. He left Manchester for Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell. During World War I he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, served on the Russian front in 1916, and was taken prisoner in Italy in 1918. He drafted the Tractatus logico-philosophicus during the war, partly in the trenches.

After the war he lived away from academic philosophy for roughly a decade, working as a village schoolteacher in Austria and as a gardener in a monastery. His return to philosophy was due in part to contacts with the logical members of the Vienna Circle.

In 1929, encouraged by friends including Frank Ramsey, he returned to Cambridge to a triumphant reception, submitted the Tractatus as his doctoral thesis, and became an assistant at Trinity College. In 1935 he considered emigrating to the Soviet Union, but the plan fell through. In 1936–37 he lived in Norway, beginning work on what would become the Philosophical Investigations. In 1939 he was appointed to the Cambridge chair of philosophy, which he held until 1947—years in which most of his “second philosophy” was written. From 1948 to 1951 he divided his time between Dublin and Cambridge, where he died of cancer on April 29, 1951.

Wittgenstein’s work is often divided into two periods. The “early” philosophy centers on the Tractatus, which tackles the logical relation between language and world. The “later” philosophy develops the theory of language games, taking shape in the 1930s and culminating in the Philosophical Investigations (published 1953) and the notes posthumously collected as On Certainty. While themes carry over, the later work moves from a monolithic, logical-atomist view of language to one attentive to the cultural diversity of linguistic uses. He also wrote on logic, the philosophy of mathematics, psychology, ethics, and more.

Selected Bibliography

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1961), Tractatus logico-philosophicus, followed by Philosophical Investigations, Paris, Gallimard.

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1965), The Blue and Brown Books, Paris, Gallimard (French ed.).

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1975), Philosophical Remarks, Paris, Gallimard (French ed.).

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1976) [1965], On Certainty, Paris, Gallimard (French ed.).

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1980), Philosophical Grammar, Paris, Gallimard (French ed.).

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1984), Remarks on Colour, Mauvezin, Trans-Europ-Repress (French ed.).

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1992) [1971], Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief; with Lecture on Ethics, Paris, Gallimard (French ed.).

WITTGENSTEIN, L. (2002), Culture and Value (Remarques mêlées), Paris, Flammarion (French ed.).

His Theories

• Language Games