Ludwig Wittgenstein

An Austrian-born philosopher who spent most of his working life at Cambridge, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century despite publishing only one book in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). The Tractatus proposed that language pictures the world proposition by proposition, that the limits of language are the limits of the world, and that most traditional philosophical problems are confusions produced by language operating outside the bounds where it can mean anything, concluding that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein later rejected much of this picture theory, and his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) argued instead that meaning is use: words get their sense from the concrete, rule-governed language games in which they are actually employed, not from a fixed correspondence to objects in the world.