In 1943, two of the century’s most original thinkers—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil—found themselves in bomb-battered London, looking for medical work to help the war effort. Though they never ...

No one expects contemporary philosophers to be more than mildly eccentric. Creatures of the modern academy, they have careers, not vocations. Some mixture of incentive and professional obligation ...

The best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had avoided philosophy of language as simply being too esoteric and hermetic to be of use. David Pears, ...

The "Wittgenstein Monument" in Skjolden, Norway, erected near the philosopher's hut in 2018 by artists Sebastian Kjølaas, Marianne Bredesen, and Siri Hjorth. (via “§4.003 Most questions and ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) sought to lead us beyond the long fantasy — so dominant in philosophy — that a single mind can figure everything out. Rather, we need the greater unity of genuine ...

Ludwig himself was of a melancholy, tortured disposition and, at least as a young adult, often brooded about committing suicide. Bertrand Russell remarked that Wittgenstein was "perhaps the most ...

In this day of divisive discourses and competing realities, the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein—the enigmatic iconoclast whose 75th death anniversary will be observed next week—have never seemed more ...

OF ALL THE innovations that sprang from the trenches of the first world war—the zip, the tea bag, the tank—the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” must be among the most elegant and humane. When the ...

He may have been one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers – perhaps the greatest – but Ludwig Wittgenstein could have been so many other things if he had turned his mind to it. An engineer, for ...