Wittgenstein, Ludwig

views updated

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951) Austrian philosopher. His masterwork, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1921), influenced logical positivism, arguing the strict relationships between language and the physical world. After 1929, he criticized this hypothesis in his Cambridge lectures, published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations (1953). He claimed language was a conventional ‘game’, where meaning was affected more by context than formal relationships to reality.

More From encyclopedia.com