User:The Rhymesmith/Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British thinker widely considered to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Wittgenstein is distinctive for the radically divergence between the philosophy he espoused in his youth, and in his later life, with both systems of thought being tremendously influential and definitive of analytic philosophy.

The young Wittgenstein co-founded analytic philosophy, alongside his mentor and colleague Bertrand Russell, who described him as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and domination." In his first philosophical work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, considered, like his later work Philosophical Investigations, to be one of the five most important books of 20th-century philosophy,> Wittgenstein gave rise to logical atomism, and to the logical positivism of the Vienna circle that would dominate Anglophone philosophy. Wittgenstein's conception of the "logical clarification of thoughts" came to define the methodology of analytic philosophy.

In his later years, Wittgenstein turned from his earlier focus on logic and instead preoccupied himself with the uses of ordinary language, developing such concepts as language-games, rule-following, and the celebrated private language argument to address a wide spectrum of philosophical issues and problems. The later Wittgenstein denied the existence of true philosophical problems, instead seeking to "dissolve" issues through careful attention to the use of language. His most famous work of the later years, the Philosophical Investigations, is described as the "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations."

Instrumental in inspiring two of the century's principal philosophical movements, logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, he is regarded as one of the most important figures in analytic philosophy. According to an end of the century poll, professional philosophers rank both his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) among the top five most important books in twentieth-century philosophy, the latter standing out as 

Wittgenstein's influence has been felt in nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences, yet there are widely diverging interpretations of his thought. For an analytic philosopher, he has been unusually well-received by the artistic community, and his name is frequently associated with genius.

Wittgenstein's thought is usually divided between his "early" period, exemplified by the Tractatus, the only book he published in his lifetime, and his "later" period, best articulated in the Investigations. The early Wittgenstein was concerned with the metaphysical relationship between propositions and the world, and saw the aim of philosophy as an attempt to describe that relationship and correct misconceptions about language through rigid logical abstraction. The later Wittgenstein was stridently anti-systematic in his approach and rejected many of the conclusions of the Tractatus. The later Wittgenstein provided a detailed account of the many possible uses of ordinary language, calling language a series of interchangeable language-games in which the meanings of words are derived not from any inherent logical structure, but from their public usage (the so-called "meaning is use" argument); thus there can be no private language. Despite these differences, similarities between the early and later periods include a conception of philosophy as a kind of therapy, concerns with the religious and ethical implications of philosophy, and a literary style often described as poetic.