Ludwig Wittgenstein: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

His philosophy is often divided into an early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, and a later period, articulated primarily in the Philosophical Investigations. The "early Wittgenstein" was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world, and he believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems. The "later Wittgenstein" rejected many of the assumptions of the Tractatus, arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language game. More precisely, Wittgenstein wrote, "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word 'meaning'—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."

Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a fortune from his father in 1913. Before World War I, he "made a very generous financial bequest to a group of poets and artists chosen by Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of Der Brenner, from artists in need. These included [Georg] Trakl as well as Rainer Maria Rilke and the architect Adolf Loos", and also the painter Oskar Kokoschka. "In autumn 1916, as his sister reported, 'Ludwig made a donation of a million crowns [equivalent to about $3.7 million in 2025] for the construction of a 30 cm mortar.'" Later, in a period of severe personal depression after World War I, he gave away his remaining fortune to his brothers and sisters. Three of his four older brothers died by separate acts of suicide.

Wittgenstein left academia several times: serving as an officer on the front line during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages, where he encountered controversy for using sometimes violent corporal punishment on both girls and boys (see, for example, the Haidbauer incident), especially during mathematics classes; working during World War II as a hospital porter in London; and working as a hospital laboratory technician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne.