Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) sought to lead us beyond the long fantasy — so dominant in philosophy — that a single mind can figure everything out. Rather, we need the greater unity of genuine ...

OF ALL THE innovations that sprang from the trenches of the first world war—the zip, the tea bag, the tank—the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” must be among the most elegant and humane. When the ...

How is it that false statements, such as “horses have eight legs”, can be just as meaningful as true statements, such as “horses have four legs”? Where does logical structure come from? We can ...

Cambridge University professor Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is frequently described as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Yet he only published one 82-page book ("Tractatus ...

Many people believe that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was the 20th century’s most important philosopher. It is somewhat ironic, then, that he is probably best known for waving a poker at fellow ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein is a notoriously difficult philosopher to read, let alone understand. Help is here in the form of one of the volumes in W.W. Norton’s new “How to Read” series. They are short books ...

Rankings of the greatest this or the most important that almost always generate dozens of column inches. We shouldn’t be surprised that one exception to this rule is a recently rediscovered list of ...

In the rarefied world of Wittgenstein scholarship it is little short of astonishing: an untapped, lost archive of original material which provides fresh insights into the utterly brilliant but ...