a. two brothers committed suicide; another became a world class pianist

b. his family were "baptized Jews"

2. Went to Cambridge to study the philosophy of mathematics with Russell; returned to Vienna to study with Frege, another philosopher of mathematics;

a. fought in Austrian army in WWI and was imprisoned during which he wrote

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published in 1922).

3. Returned to Cambridge in 1929 and taught

4. Wrote a second book, Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953.

a. he wrote many journals and unpublished books

b. despised the academic environment of Cambridge and left to farm and garden

5. Died with Augustine's Confessions and Tolstoy's Resurrection beside his bed; his last words were "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

1. It consists of short tracts with seven main propositions he tries to elucidate

a. The world is everything that is the case; the world is the totality of facts, not

things;

b. What is the case--a fact--is the existence of states of affairs; we picture facts

to ourselves; a picture has a logical-pictorial form in common with what

it depicts;

c. A logical picture of facts is a thought; in a proposition, a thought finds an

expression that can be perceived by the senses;

d. A thought is a proposition with a meaning; propositions represent the

existence or non-existence of states of affairs; the general form of a

proposition is--"This is how things stand."

e. A proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions, which is a truth

function of itself; the limits of my language mean the limits of my world;

g. All propositions are of equal value; when the answer cannot be put into words,

the questions cannot either; the riddle does not exist; if a question can be

framed at all, it is als0o possible to answer it; we feel that even if all

possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still

not been touched at all; there is indeed the inexpressible; this shows itself;

it is the mystical;

h. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen (Whereof one

cannot speak, thereof one must be silent).

2. Its three main features:

a. logical atomism--reality consists of individual units;

b. the picture theory of meaning--thoughts represent reality;

c. the mystical (which is the ethical, aesthetical, religious) is ineffable and hence the

greatest realization;

3. The book's main argument:

a. the world is the collections of facts about which science can inform us;

b. the facts are known in thoughts, which are concepts, which are propositions,

which can be logically analyzed by truth function analysis;

c. a logical form has a twofold meaning:

1) it's dependent on logical form;

2) it pictures a similar structure in reality

d. logic is the only certain knowledge because it prescribes what can be said clearly;

what can be known can be known clearly;

e. we must be silent about what science and logic cannot clearly explain; the

mystical limits all experience and can only be shown, not said

B. Main features of Philosophical Investigations (written in numbered paragraphs)

1. He rejected the picture theory of reference and meaning of the Tractatus

2. Language is not artificial to experience; it's a form of life (para. 19, 23)

a. each language functions as a game with its internal rules

it's like a "toolbox" (para. 11); language does not function in just one way

b. philosophy is to help language function according to its own internal rules

"What is the aim of philosophy?--To show the fly the way out of the fly

bottle" (309)

c. there is no universal grammar and logic is not the essence of language; it's

one part of a language activity

3. Philosophical problems arise when "language goes on holiday" (para. 38)

4. There is no private language or private meaning; language is always contextual

a. the real question is not "what is the meaning of 'X'?" but "how do we come to

learn the meaning of 'X' in order to use it?"

b. we learn concepts through learning a language; "It is what human beings say that

is true andfalse; and they agree inthe language they use. That is not

agreement in opinions but in the forms of life (241)"

Learning a language is like, "how one can imitate a man's face without

seeing one's own in a mirror (285)"

c. the clue to meaning--the meaning of a word is its use in a language (206,243)

5. Language is like an ancient city map with no rules (18)

6. A thorough rejection of Cartesian dualism in which the mind thinks privately and then worries about correspondence with reality; though thinking is mental it's a linguistic hence public activity;

7. Also rejects the following philosophies of language:

a. Frege's "sense is meaning"

b. Russell's "logic is the essence of language"

c. the Tractatus' "picture theory"

d. the mechanical cognitive science because it cannot explain its own description

e. the common sense notion that language is just a mental process

f. Wittgenstein--the life of language is the meaning of its use in our own form of

life