Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian-British · 1889–1951
One of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers, whose work centred on the relationship between language, thought, and reality. His early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) treated meaningful language as a logical picture of the world. He spent the second half of his life dismantling that view, arguing in the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953) that meaning is not a mapping onto things but is constituted by use — by the public "language games" we play with each other. His later work is often invoked as a diagnosis of and partial reprieve from the threat of solipsism.