Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951: A philosopher of international standing
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was born in 1889 in Vienna and died in 1951 in Cambridge, counts among the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.
Ludwig Wittgenstein came from a family of Jewish industrialists. After studying engineering, he went to the University of Cambridge, where he delved into logics and the philosophy of mathematics. Having spent time in Vienna, Cambridge, and Norway, he finally settled in Great Britain in 1938, became a British citizen and was a tenured professor in Cambridge until 1947. The Vienna-based Wittgenstein Initiative aspires to honour this great thinker and his ideas in Austria.
The focus of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work is on language. During World War I, he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he published in 1922. His Philosphical Investigations were published posthumously in 1953. In 2017, his entire philosophical legacy was inscribed in the UNESCO world heritage list.
