Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher whose two main works set the agenda for much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Born in 1889 in Vienna, the youngest of eight children of the steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein, he grew up in a household visited by Brahms and Mahler and was educated at home before studying mechanical engineering in Berlin and aeronautics in Manchester.

Drawn from engineering to the foundations of mathematics, he went to Cambridge in 1911 to study under Bertrand Russell. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern and Italian fronts during the First World War and completed his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while a prisoner of war. Published in German in 1921 and in English in 1922, it argued that the limits of language are the limits of the world and ended with the dictum that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Believing he had solved the main problems of philosophy, he gave away his inherited fortune and worked as a village schoolteacher in Lower Austria, an architect on his sister's Vienna house, and a gardener at a monastery before returning to Cambridge in 1929. There he developed the radically different view of meaning as use that animates the posthumous Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953.

He took British citizenship in 1939, succeeded G.E. Moore as professor of philosophy at Cambridge that year, and served as a hospital porter during the Second World War. He died of prostate cancer in 1951 in Cambridge.

The name Ludwig comes from the Old High German Hludwig, meaning famous warrior. He bore it as a masculine name long established in German-speaking countries.