This article first appeared in the June 2026 edition of our email newsletter.
+This article first appeared in the June 2025 edition of our email newsletter.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, born in 1889, was a member of one of the most prominent families of late nineteenth-century Vienna. After studying engineering, he went on to exert an enormous influence upon English-speaking philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only philosophical work he published during his lifetime, and despite its brevity it has earned a well-deserved reputation for obscurity. It primarily concerns the relationship between language and the world, but also responds to then-recent advances in logic made by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege and the English philosopher Bertrand Russell.