Philosophy
1889 to 1951, Vienna, Austria
Two revolutions in the philosophy of language - the picturing of facts, and meaning as use in the games of life.
Start learning Ludwig →In his first masterpiece, the young Wittgenstein argues that language pictures the world, that the limits of language are the limits of thought and world, and that most philosophy is nonsense - the attempt to say what c…
Wittgenstein returns to philosophy and overturns his own first book. Meaning is not a picture and words do not mean by labelling objects; the meaning of a word is its use in the practices of life. Language is a motley o…
Wittgenstein’s famous argument that there could be no ‘private language’ - a language whose words refer to private sensations knowable only to the speaker. Without a public standard of correctness, the…
Beneath meaning lies the puzzle of what it is to follow a rule. Any rule can be interpreted in endless ways, so no interpretation can fix correct use; rule-following must be a practice, a custom, grounded not in further…
The thread running through both Wittgenstein’s philosophies is a reverence for what lies beyond theory - ethics, value, the meaning of life - and a conviction that what matters most cannot be captured in doctrine…
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