Wittgenstein – Life and Works

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna, the eighth child of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. The family was of Jewish descent, although they had converted to Catholicism a generation earlier. Karl Wittgenstein was the leading Austrian steel baron – the Carnegie of the Austrian steel industry – and one of the wealthiest men in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a great patron of the arts, and the family's palatial home in Vienna was the leading music salon there at the turn of the century. Brahms was a friend of the family, Mahler frequented the house, and Bruno Walter, Joseph Joachim and young Pablo Casals all played at the Wittgenstein musical evenings. Young Ludwig was brought up in an haute-bourgeois family of great cultivation and refined sensibility, wide intellectual and artistic interests, and a powerful sense of social and moral obligation.

Wittgenstein was taught at home by private tutors until the age of 14, after which he went to school in Linz. After graduating from high school, he went to study for a diploma in engineering at a technical college in Berlin. He completed the diploma course in 1908. Having become interested in the budding science of aeronautics, he went to Manchester University to do research on flight and subsequently on a jet reaction propeller. It was while doing this that he came across, and became fascinated by, the writings of Gottlob Frege and of Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of logic and mathematics. The upshot was that he went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1911 to read for an advanced degree under the supervision of Russell. Russell later described him at this period as being ‘perhaps the most perfect example I have known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating’.1 Within six months, the two men were discussing philosophy as equals, and Russell looked upon Wittgenstein as his successor in philosophical research.2 Between 1913 and early 1917, Wittgenstein worked on composing materials for his first philosophical masterpiece: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In this work, he confronted the views of his two great predecessors and mentors, the German mathematical logician Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, undermining their conceptions of logic as a science with a subject matter.