Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an Austrian-born philosopher, the son of a wealthy Viennese industrial family, who studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester before going to Cambridge in 1911 to work with Bertrand Russell on the foundations of logic. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and completed the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published 1921-22), then gave away his inheritance and taught in village schools in Lower Austria. Returning to Cambridge in 1929, he developed a new approach to philosophy in lectures and manuscripts, and held the chair of philosophy there from 1939 to 1947, interrupted by wartime work as a hospital porter in London and a laboratory assistant in Newcastle. He died in Cambridge in 1951; the Philosophical Investigations appeared two years later.
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“the meaning of a word is its use in the language”
Philosophical Investigations is the major work of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, published in 1953, two years after his death, in a bilingual German and English edition with a translation by his student G. E. M. Anscombe. It consists of numbered remarks, from a single sentence to a page long, in which Wittgenstein questions, imagines examples, answers an imaginary interlocutor and frequently turns against views he himself had held in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.