Wittgenstein

American  

[vit-guhn-shtahyn, -stahyn] / ˈvɪt gənˌʃtaɪn, -ˌstaɪn /

noun

1. Ludwig (Josef Johann) 1889–1951, Austrian philosopher.

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Wittgenstein British  

/ -ˌstaɪn, ˈvɪtɡənˌʃtaɪn /

noun

1. Ludwig Josef Johann (ˈluːtvɪç ˈjoːzɛf joˈhan). 1889–1951, British philosopher, born in Austria. After studying with Bertrand Russell, he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), which explores the relationship of language to the world. He was a major influence on logical positivism but later repudiated this, and in Philosophical Investigations (1953) he argues that philosophical problems arise from insufficient attention to the variety of natural language use

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Other Word Forms

• Wittgensteinian adjective

Example Sentences

Milne, like Lewis Carroll, was trained as a mathematician, and some of his dialogue reads like Tom Stoppard doing Wittgenstein: “How are you?”

From The Wall Street Journal

“If a lion could speak,” Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “we could not understand him,” because his thoughts and experiences of being a lion in the world would simply be too alien to us.

From The Wall Street Journal

There, he met Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, and went to all the lectures in biology and chemistry he could find.

From The Wall Street Journal

On the final exam on Wittgenstein, we were given the prompt: “Describe, in words he would use, Wittgenstein’s overall view of his own philosophy.”

From The Wall Street Journal

Anthony Gottlieb sums him up in an engrossing biography, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes,” writing that “his charismatic gift was to be halting, self-deprecating and imperious all at the same time.”

From The Wall Street Journal