Ludwig Wittgenstein: Language, Meaning, and the Limits of Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Language, Meaning, and the Limits of Philosophy

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Vienna, Wittgenstein studied engineering at the University of Manchester before turning to philosophy under the influence of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. His two major works — the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) — represent two radically different philosophies of language, each of which has had profound implications for the philosophy of religion. For AQA A-Level Religious Studies (specification 7062), Wittgenstein is essential for understanding debates about religious language, the meaningfulness of God-talk, and the relationship between language and reality.

The Early Wittgenstein: The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The Tractatus (1921) is one of the most compressed and enigmatic works in the history of philosophy. Written while Wittgenstein served as a soldier in World War I, it consists of a series of numbered propositions (1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, etc.) and attempts to determine the logical structure of language and its relationship to reality.

The central idea of the Tractatus is the picture theory of meaning: