Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 into a wealthy industrialist family. He studied engineering before turning to philosophy under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. His first major work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), proposed that language pictures facts and that what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence. After a decade away from philosophy, he returned to Cambridge, where his later work—published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations—rejected his earlier views, arguing that meaning arises from language use in social practices. Though he published only one book in his lifetime, his ideas reshaped analytic philosophy, influencing logic, philosophy of mind, and language. Wittgenstein died in Cambridge in 1951.