Art, literature & culture

Death of Ludwig Wittgenstein

29 April 1951

Ludwig Wittgenstein died on 29 April 1951 in Cambridge, aged 62. An Austrian-born philosopher who worked mostly in Cambridge, Wittgenstein came from one of Vienna's wealthiest families and studied under Bertrand Russell. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, completed after he served in the First World War, argued that the limits of language are the limits of the world, and he believed it solved the main problems of philosophy. He then gave away his fortune and taught in village schools before returning to Cambridge. His later work, published after his death as Philosophical Investigations, rejected much of his earlier thinking and examined language through everyday use and language games. He is among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.

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