Wittgenstein, Ludwig J. J.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig J. J. (1889–1951)Though he was born in Vienna and lived in Austria until 1912, Wittgenstein is often regarded as the most important English-language philosopher of the 20th century. His extraordinary achievement was to have produced two profoundly influential but mutually incompatible philosophies in the course of his relatively short academic career.
Wittgenstein's early philosophical work was influenced by Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics, and its most complete expression was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and then in English in 1922. At the core of this work was a view of language and meaning, according to which each sentence is a picture of some possible state of affairs. Sentences are combinations of names, which, in some ultimate analysis, must refer unambiguously to simple objects. For this...
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