WITTGENSTEIN THE LOGICIAN (1889-1951) "We are engaged in a struggle with language."

One of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein developed two philosophies, in which he sought to discover the nature of human language.

During World War I, Wittgenstein sought certainty in a world gone mad. While held captive in an Italian prisoner of war camp, he began to keep philosophical notebooks. Out of this developed the highly influential "Tractatus logico-philosophicus" (1922). In this work, Wittgenstein examined the nature of language, asserting that a proposition must represent what he called "a picture of reality". The world, he maintained, consists of simple objects which cannot be analyzed and which are the bearers of logically proper names arranged so as to constitute facts, which exist independent of individual will.

When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, he gradually came to reject the ideas he had expounded in his earlier work, concluding that there is no single essence of language and that meaning arises as a function of how humans use language. Finding university life increasingly distasteful, Wittgenstein in 1947, resigned the chair at Cambridge which he had held since 1939. The second of his great philosophical works, "Philosophical Investigations" was published in 1953, after his death from cancer.