Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, the youngest of eight children of the steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein, one of the richest men in Europe; the composer Johannes Brahms was among the family's visitors. He studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, where he became interested in the foundations of mathematics, and in 1911 he went to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and completed his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while a prisoner of war; it was published in 1921. Believing he had solved the main problems of philosophy, he gave away his inherited fortune, worked as a schoolteacher in rural Austria, as a gardener in a monastery and on the design of a house for his sister. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and became professor of philosophy in 1939. In the Second World War he worked as a hospital porter in London. His later ideas, which describe language as a set of 'language games', appeared after his death in Philosophical Investigations (1953). He died in Cambridge in 1951.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Baptized in a Catholic church and given a Catholic burial; his father's parents were Jewish converts to Protestantism. Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy