Thinker · TH-0021
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian-British philosopher who studied with Russell at Cambridge and later held a chair there. His early Tractatus offered a picture theory of meaning and…
Austrian-British philosopher who studied with Russell at Cambridge and later held a chair there. His early Tractatus offered a picture theory of meaning and the limits of language; his later work rejected much of it in favour of meaning as use within language-games and forms of life.
Key ideas
- Propositions as logical pictures of facts (early)
- What can be shown cannot be said
- Meaning as use; language-games and forms of life (later)
- The private language argument and rule-following
Major works
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921; English 1922)
- Philosophical Investigations (1953)
- On Certainty (1969)
In the conversation
- Reading group Reading group: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, propositions 1–3
- Question How can I know nothing is red and green all over, when I’ve never checked every red thing?
- Debate Knowledge-first epistemology is surrender dressed up as a theory
- Question I know within ten seconds whether a room will laugh, but I can’t say how. Does that count as knowing?
- Question What is the difference between my arm rising and my raising it? A capoeirista asks
- Question Why does Cora Diamond say we don’t eat our dead, and what does that have to do with animals?
- Debate Schmitt’s uncomfortable point survives: no constitution can fully govern its own emergencies
- Debate Moore’s “here is one hand” is not really an argument, and that is exactly why it works
- Debate Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
- Discussion Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational?
- Reading group Reading group: Weitz, Danto and Dickie on whether art can be defined
- Reading group Reading group: Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, about a hundred remarks a week
- Debate Global scepticism refutes itself, and the famous escape routes do not work
- Reading group Reading group: Plato’s Theaetetus, the three definitions of knowledge
- Question Wittgenstein said philosophy “leaves everything as it is”. Is quietism a position, or a refusal to have one?