Ludwig Wittgenstein

1889 – 1951

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austro-British philosopher whose work in logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind reshaped 20th-century analytic philosophy twice over. His 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus argued that the limits of language are the limits of the world; he then spent decades repudiating its conclusions before producing the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), which redirected the field toward the study of ordinary language and meaning-as-use. He taught at Cambridge from 1929 to 1947 and is widely considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

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