Ludwig Wittgenstein's burning ambition was to bring an end to philosophy, and he considered he had done so - twice. He was brilliant, charming, rude, arrogant, witty, brave and on occasions suicidal.
Equally as confusing is his philosophy. In fact he seemed to be two different philosophers, the older one disowning the work of the younger one. However, both of them agreed that language gives a picture of the world"
"The limits of my
LANGUAGE are the
limits of my REALITY"
Born in Vienna in the era of Freud, Wittgenstein was the son of a mega-rich steel magnate. Genius and emotional instability were family traits. Three of his four brother committed suicide. The other lost a hand in the First Word War, but he still made it as a concert pianist. Persistence was also one of Ludwig's major characteristics.
He launched into philosophy after studying Logic with the English philosopher Bertrand Russell. Logic was Wittgenstein's tool. His aim was to solve all traditional philosophical problems. In his first work he claimed to do just that. He said he was a businessman, like his father, and he was doing away with the business of philosophy.
Wittgenstein simply divided what could and could not be spoken about with any meaning. He said that language could only reflect the real world. So it was illogical to speak about God or the other great philosophical questions because they lay outside the human experience.
As a philosophy lecturer, his eccentricity was legendary. His rooms were bare apart from a safe, in which he kept his notes. He lectured in a deckchair - ordering his students to bring their own. After class, he would rush off to the cinema, where he sat in the front row and watched any old film, trying to forget the futility of his profession.
He loved books by Lewis Carroll about the adventures of Alice because the use of Carroll's words demonstrated how they could lead to complete nonsense.
He inherited two fortunes and gave them both away
He lived as a hermit in a hut in Norway for two years working on logic.
"Philosophy is a ladder to climb and then discard..."
He invented a plane propeller
He wrote his first book on philosophy while he was a prisoner of war
He loved to watch second-rate cowboy movies
