Ludwig Wittgenstein

:For other people of this name, see Wittgenstein (disambiguation)

Work

The Tractatus

Main article: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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In rough order, the first half of the book sets forth the following theses:

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• the world consists of independent atomic facts — existing states of affairs — out of which larger facts are built.
• Language consists of atomic, and then larger-scale propositions that correspond to these facts by sharing the same "logical form."
• Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts.
• We can analyse our thoughts and sentences to express ('express' as in show, not say) their true logical form.
• Those we cannot so analyse cannot be meaningfully discussed.
• Philosophy consists of no more than this form of analysis: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" — whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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Some commentators believe that, although no other type of discourse is, properly speaking, philosophy, Wittgenstein does imply that those things to be passed over "in silence" may be important or useful, according to some of his more cryptic propositions in the last sections of the Tractatus: indeed, may be the most important and most useful. Other commentators point out that the sentences of the Tractatus would not qualify as meaningful according to its own rigid criteria, and that Wittgenstein's method in the book does not follow its own demands regarding the only strictly correct philosophical method. These commentators believe that the book is deeply ironical, and that it demonstrates the ultimate nonsensicality of any sentence attempting to say something philosophical, something about those fixations of philosophers, about those things that must be passed over in silence, and about logic.

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Intermediary 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 for 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. 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 presentations 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 R. B. Braithwaite as a case in point, and asked philosophers to hold off writing about his views until he was himself ready to publish them.

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Although unpublished, 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 Investigations), and is widely read today as a turning point in his philosophy of language.

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The Philosophical Investigations

Main article: Philosophical Investigations

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Although the Tractatus is a major work of philosophy, it is for the Philosophical Investigations (PI) (known as Philosophische Untersuchungen in German) that Wittgenstein is best known today. Published posthumously in 1953, PI comprises two parts. Part I, consisting of 693 numbered paragraphs, which was ready for printing in 1946 but was withdrawn from the publisher by Wittgenstein, and Part II which was added on by the editors, trustees of his estate.

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It is notoriously difficult to find consensus among interpreters of Wittgenstein's work, and this is particularly true concerning PI. What follows, then, is but one of many readings to be found. In PI, Wittgenstein presents an analysis of our use of language which he sees as crucial to the carrying out of philosophical research. In brief, Wittgenstein describes language as a set of language-games within which the words of our language function and receive their meaning. This view of meaning as use represents a break from the classical view, also presented by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, of meaning as representation.

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One of the most radical characteristics of "later" Wittgenstein is his view of the task of philosophy. The "conventional" view of philosophy, accepted by almost every Western philosopher since Plato, is that the philosopher's task was to solve a number of seemingly intractable problems using logical analysis (for example, the problem of "free will", the relationship between "mind" and "matter", what is "the good" or "the beautiful" and so on). However, Wittgenstein argued in PI that these "problems" were in fact pseudo-problems that arose from philosopher's misuse of language. Wittgenstein's new philosophical methodology was to continually remind the philosopher of the facts of linguistic usage that they had forgotten in their search for abstract "truths". It would then become obvious that the great questions posed by philosophers had arisen because they presupposed a mistaken view of language and its relation to reality. Philosophers in the Western tradition were not "wiser" than anyone else, as had been assumed — they were simply ordinary men and women more likely to entrap themselves in linguistic confusion. The task of the true philosopher (i.e. Wittgenstein) was to "show the fly out of the fly bottle": to show that the problems with which philosophers tormented themselves were in fact not really problems at all, but rather were examples of "language gone on holiday," as he put it. So the true philosopher becomes more like a therapist removing distress and confusion than someone who creates or discusses philosophical theories or positions.

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Later work

• On Certainty — A collection of aphorisms discussing the relation between knowledge and certainty, extremely influential in the philosophy of action.
• Remarks on Colour — Remarks on Goethe's Theory of Colours.

Important publications

• Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14 (1921)
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C.K. Ogden (1922)
• Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953)
• Philosophical Investigations, trans. 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 from his writings on the philosophy of logic and mathematics between 1937 and 1944)
• Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, rev. ed. (1978)
• The Blue and Brown Books (1958) (Notes dictated in English to Cambridge students in 1933-35)
• Philosophische Bemerkungen, ed. by Rush Rhees (1964)
• Philosophical Remarks (1975)