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

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

The world's only professional one-handed concert pianist, Nicholas McCarthy, makes his Proms debut, playing a concerto originally written for Paul Wittgenstein, after he lost his right arm during World War One.

From BBC

The subjects being communicated by animals may be unlike anything humans might expect or comprehend, which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once summed up by arguing, “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”

From Salon