Birth in Vienna
He was born on 26 April into one of the wealthiest industrial families of the Habsburg Empire.
Logic and language · analytic philosophy · 1889–1951
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Vienna · Cambridge · Skjolden
Biography
The thread of a life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-born philosopher, trained as an engineer and for many years a teacher at Cambridge, whose work turns on the relation between language, logic and the world. His Tractatus sought the limits of what can be meaningfully said; his later writings, published after his death, treat meaning as use within shared practices and philosophy as the patient clarification of conceptual confusion.
Cambridge and Russell
He studied logic with Bertrand Russell, then withdrew to Norway to work alone.
War and the Tractatus
He served in the Austro-Hungarian army and finished the Tractatus shortly before being taken prisoner in Italy.
Village schoolteacher
He taught in primary schools of Lower Austria and compiled a spelling dictionary for his pupils.
Return to Cambridge
He resumed philosophy, held the chair from 1939 and kept reworking the material of the Investigations.
Last notes
He wrote the notes later published as On Certainty and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951.
Understanding a life in depth
01Vienna, engineering and logic
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, the youngest child of the steel industrialist Karl Wittgenstein, in a wealthy family at the heart of the city’s musical life. He studied engineering in Berlin and from 1908 researched aeronautics in Manchester, where questions about the foundations of mathematics led him to the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. On Frege’s advice he went to Cambridge in 1911 to study with Russell, who quickly came to regard him as a collaborator rather than a pupil. In 1913 he withdrew to Skjolden in Norway to work on logic alone, a pattern of retreat that recurs throughout his life.
02War, the Tractatus and the years away
When war broke out in 1914 he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, served on the Eastern and later the Italian front and was decorated for bravery, while filling notebooks with work on logic. He completed the Tractatus in 1918 and was taken prisoner in Italy that November. Back in Vienna in 1919, he gave away his share of the family fortune, trained as a teacher and taught in village schools of Lower Austria from 1920 to 1926; the Tractatus appeared in 1921 with Russell’s help. He then worked as a monastery gardener and, with the architect Paul Engelmann, designed a house in Vienna for his sister Margarethe. Conversations with Frank Ramsey and members of the Vienna Circle prepared his return to philosophy.
03Cambridge and a new way of philosophizing
Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, submitted the Tractatus as his doctoral thesis and began filling manuscripts that gradually dismantled his earlier account of logical form. The Blue and Brown Books, dictated to students between 1933 and 1935, introduced language games. After the annexation of Austria in 1938 he applied for British nationality, which he obtained in 1939, the year he succeeded G. E. Moore in the chair of philosophy. During the Second World War he worked as a porter at Guy’s Hospital in London and then in a medical research unit in Newcastle. His teaching, intense and unconventional, shaped a generation of students, though he published almost nothing.
04Last years and posthumous works
He resigned his chair in 1947 to write, living for long periods in rural Ireland, notably on the Connemara coast, and then in Dublin. After visiting Norman Malcolm in the United States in 1949, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He spent his last months in Cambridge in the house of his doctor, Edward Bevan, and died there on 29 April 1951; his reported last words were “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Almost everything else now read under his name was edited from manuscripts and typescripts by his literary executors Rush Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, so editorial decisions belong to every interpretation of his later thought.
His two very different bodies of work shaped the Vienna Circle, ordinary language philosophy, philosophy of mind and debates on rules, certainty and skepticism. Interpreters still disagree about how far the later writings break with the Tractatus and about how to read texts he never prepared for publication.
Sources & reference points