Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein wrote two short books that contradict each other, and both reshaped twentieth-century philosophy. He thought he had solved philosophy with the first one, walked away, came back a decade later, and spent the rest of his life dismantling it.

The *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus* (1921) is seventy-five pages of numbered propositions. The world is everything that is the case. Facts are configurations of objects. Language pictures facts. Logic shows the structure of the world. Whatever can be said can be said clearly; about what we cannot speak, we must be silent. The closing move is the killer: the propositions of the book itself fail their own test — they're ladders to be climbed and then thrown away. The Vienna Circle adopted the book as a foundational text for logical positivism. Wittgenstein thought they'd badly misread it.

He spent the 1920s teaching schoolchildren in rural Austria, designed a house for his sister, then returned to Cambridge and gradually built the position of the *Philosophical Investigations* (published posthumously in 1953). Meaning isn't picture-mirror correspondence; meaning is use. Words function inside "language-games" — embedded practices with their own rules. The mistakes philosophers make are usually grammatical: a word ripped from its normal habitat starts looking like it names something deep and mysterious, when really it was always doing more pedestrian work.

The famous arguments — the private language argument, the rule-following considerations, "a picture held us captive" — are aimed at a tradition that takes itself as discovering eternal truths about Mind, Knowledge, Language, when (Wittgenstein thinks) it's mostly bewitched by its own grammar. The philosophical job is therapeutic: show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

He didn't quite invent ordinary-language philosophy, but he made it possible. Half of late-twentieth-century philosophy is in conversation with one Wittgenstein or the other.