Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: The Philosopher Who Changed His Mind Twice

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889, in Vienna, into a wealthy and large industrial family. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the family home hosted musicians and intellectuals passing through the city. Three of Ludwig’s four brothers died by suicide, a grief that ran through his family; the sources do not give the dates of the individual episodes.

In 1908 Wittgenstein began studying aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester (one source places an earlier period of mechanical engineering in Berlin before that). That technical interest, combined with a curiosity about the foundations of pure mathematics, led him to read Gottlob Frege.

The meeting that changed his course

Frege, the German logician who lived between 1848 and 1925, did not keep Wittgenstein long as a student: he advised him to go study with Bertrand Russell instead. Wittgenstein moved to Cambridge in 1911. Russell, for his part, described him in an early reaction as a headstrong and difficult student, though hardly a dull one; later, in a different judgment, he wrote that he wanted to encourage him, expected great things from him, and felt genuine affection for him. Wittgenstein himself acknowledged a debt to Frege’s work and to Russell’s writings for many of the stimuli behind his own thinking.

The problems of logic and mathematics Wittgenstein debated with Frege and Russell offer a direct demonstration of inductive and deductive reasoning: on that technical ground he built his own thought.

Practical example: when an analytic philosopher asks what a sentence really means, the answer comes from looking at the sentence’s own grammar, at how those words actually get used. It is the kind of question the early Wittgenstein would have dismissed as logically meaningless, and the later Wittgenstein would have approached by observing ordinary language use, an approach set apart from the more speculative path of Heidegger’s existentialism.

The war and the Tractatus

In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian army. He kept up his philosophical work during his service, received several medals for bravery, and was taken prisoner in November 1918. The work of those years culminated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book Wittgenstein published during his lifetime.

The core of the Tractatus can be summed up in a single claim: all philosophy is, at bottom, a critique of language. For Wittgenstein, traditional philosophical questions often arise from a confused or mistaken use of words.

The Vienna Circle and the linguistic turn

The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle were deeply struck by what they found in the Tractatus. The Circle brought together, between 1924 and 1936, philosophers who met almost every week during term time to rework empiricism alongside the advances of the physical and formal sciences of the day.

In line with the thesis of the Tractatus, the Circle carried out what has come to be called the linguistic turn. In 1930 these discussions gained real momentum from Friedrich Waismann’s accounts of Wittgenstein’s meetings with him and with Moritz Schlick. Wittgenstein himself returned to Cambridge to take up philosophical work again only in 1929, after being exposed to these exchanges on the philosophy of mathematics and science.

The later Wittgenstein: the Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein’s later work, above all the Philosophical Investigations, shares with the Tractatus an interest in logic and language, but with a different, less technical approach. It is this later Wittgenstein, known chiefly for the Philosophical Investigations, who takes the most radical step in his critique of traditional philosophy, leaving behind the closed logical system of the Tractatus to observe how language actually gets used in everyday life. The book has its own Recap.

The final years

Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer in Cambridge in April 1951. According to one source, his last words were, in translation, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life”: different sources report slightly different wordings of this phrase, and it should be read as testimony rather than an exact, settled quotation.

The notes of his last years are collected in On Certainty, which has its own Recap.

The logical empiricism developed by the Vienna Circle, drawing in part on the Tractatus, went on to influence the development of analytic philosophy of science in the period after the Second World War. The Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations each have a longer story than the one told here: they are covered in separate Recaps, each devoted to a single work.