Essay Sample on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein also referred to by his full name that is Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, was born in Vienna, Austria, on April 26th, 1889. Many scholars have referred and regarded him to be the supreme philosopher that the 20th century had. He had a comfortable upbringing from being born in a very wealthy family, one that was very remarkable in Habsburg Vienna. Karl’s father, Mr. Wittgenstein, had risen to be a very notable figure and icon as he was leading in the steel and iron manufacturing businesses in Austria and was seen as an industrialist of great energy and talent. Karl Wittgenstein was brought up like a protestant. However, he was of Jewish origin, and he also married a Catholic who was also part Jewish, with whom they seared eight children with the great philosopher Ludwig being the youngest of them all.

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In the most dynamic episodes of the Viennese cultural ways, the home of Karl Wittgenstein became the main center of the action, with it having both talent and money abundantly. The family was able to host most of the great writers of the time in their home artists, influencers, and intellects of fin de siècle Vienna—including Gustav Klimt, Karl Kraus, Sigmund Freud, and Oskar Kokoschka, who became their regular visitors. The family also hosted musical evenings, which were joined by the likes of Johannes Brahms, Bruno Walter, and Gustav Mahler, among many other famous people.

Leopardine Wittgenstein, as well as many of his children, had great skills in the piano, and the standard in which they played was very highly remarked. One of his children, Paul, hailed in the field and became very popular and demanded concert performer and Hance another one of his was very respected in the same field and referred to as a musical prodigy who was comparable to Mozart. The family was also attacked by tragedies that seemed to haunt the family and pose an alarming picture as a tree of Ludwig’s brothers Rudolf, Hans, and Kurt—committed suicide, after fighting with their father and rebelling against his wish was to see them pursue careers in the music industry. (Wittgenstein, Wright, Rhees, and Anscombe, 2001).

Ludwig started influencing people with is his great thinking when he wrote his first book, sex, and character (1903). Everyone could choose Ludwig because of his connection between his logical thinking and that of natural science. For him, he used philosophy as a tool to give exposure to the places where authority as given to vanity, lack of clarity, and that of resolving his expression powers, which led to him being dishonest towards other people. They thought he was not honest with himself. He encountered the same challenges as everyone faces when inheriting a language, which was very difficult as he was trying to make a life of our own opinion and judgment, which is his significant cognitive contributions that make the struggles he passed through worth living in the philosophy field.

Weininger is listed to be among the people who influenced Ludwig with is pathological prejudice. It is said that what impressed Wittgenstein about Weininger's books how he was strict and also very passionately insisting that looking forward to accomplishing genius work that was of high cognitive levels and high intelligence in the years before and the years to come was the only thigh that he felt was worth living for. Wittgenstein's life was the determination of a singular mind to live upon his own rules and principles as it was characterized by most. During the pursuit period, he was ready and very prepared to let everything go, including natural science for philosophy.

Although Ludwig made music as a young boy, his most profound interest was in engineering, which led him to leave for Manchester in England in 1908 to study aeronautical engineering. Most of the time, when Wittgenstein was occupied in a project that was determined towards designing a jet propeller, which he became so obsessed with absorbing him into pure and applied mathematics problems. The interest to solve mathematics problems came about before reading the foundation to arithmetic (1884) written by Gottlob Frege and the principle of mathematics (1903) written by Bertrand Russell, which led to more obsession and interests towards mathematics and developed an obsessive interest in the philosophy. Wittgenstein traveled to the Trinity College University of Cambridge in 1911 to meet Russell. Ludwig's life and studies changed the moment they met.

Aeronautical studies of Wittgenstein got forgotten in favor of savagely acute obsession with logic questions. At that moment, Ludwig came about the most suitable subjects towards his specific nature of genius. The intensity in which he Wittgenstein worked with made him declare that there was nothing that was left that was to be taught to him within a year, and Russel too declared that there was nothing that was left that he too could teach him. After feeling that he gained enough from Russel, Ludwig departed from Cambridge and went to work on his remote isolation, where he lived in a hut that was made from wood that had been built in Norway by the fjord side. At that moment, the philosopher invented what is now referred to as picture concept of meaning, a central doctrine which states that “a proposal can express a fact under sharing with it a typical configuration or by reasonable form." (Wittgenstein, 2008)

This rational form should be on point as it is the main reason for picturing because it makes it possible, as it cannot happen by itself. This further explains that logic is unutterable and that Russel and pace Frege are involved in logical truths or logical facts. The compatibleness form, rather than being stated, has to be shown. However, some of the methods of symbolisms and language might tend to reveal their structures perceptively unevenly, none of them can represent their structure. Due to the nature of perfectionism that Wittgenstein’s withheld, it hindered him from writing the ideas down, which would be very beneficial. He had just two series of notes where one was for G.E. Moore and the other to Russell, and his broad thinking lines can be gathered from them.

Ludwig later went to live in Vienna with his family during the outbreak of the world war in 1914 during the summer period. He later joined the Australian army after he encountered difficulties in returning to Fjord to continue with his logic works. He believed and hoped that encountering with death would help him in focusing his mind towards the things that mattered about life, cognitive clarity as well as the moral decency, through which he desired to attain a degree in ethical seriousness. He died on 29 April 1951, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

One of his most exciting ideas concerning Ludwig's philosophy was the pedestal on which he placed art and taught others to put art, above all other human activities, consistently, throughout his philosophy early and late. The ideal is attractive not only because it gives some insight into what Wittgenstein was like as a person, and philosopher, but because it presents a stark contrast to the school, logical positivism, Wittgenstein supposedly fathered.

Although Wittgenstein labeled art, and metaphysical statements, at one point, as "nonsense" or lacking in "sense," and moved on to posit them in their own "language game," he, although acknowledging that such things didn't "add to our knowledge in any real sense," stated that they were documents "of a tendency in the human mind which I cannot help respecting deeply." The man loved Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy; he worked in a monastery and a hospital; he was a humanist, and his genius sometimes obscures this fact.

Wittgenstein's consideration of aesthetics (also about religious belief and psychology – Cambridge 1938). This was a mess of thoughts, yet they were immensely fruitful, and I feel they were just as productive as a turning point in Wittgenstein's career. Ludwig reconsiders how we define art. He questions the general practice to analyze the object and its supposedly intrinsic and formal qualities as a masterpiece of art. He asks whether we can think of art as an inherent essential quality. Wittgenstein proposes to think of how we use the object. We might display medieval altar paintings and "primitive" African cult masks in museums of art, and we might say that African cult objects have a design and hence power to move us comparable to expressionistic sculptures.

A more precise understanding, so Wittgenstein, would be that we use these objects of other cultures within our own culture to appreciate them as art. We do not even know whether the aboriginal cultures had spheres of art in our sense of the word. They might just play "entirely different games" with objects we perceive as art. I found these 1938 thoughts initially rather trivial until I realized that the word literature could not be used for plays, poems, and fiction before the 1750s. Having read Wittgenstein, I was immediately ready to think that the very compound of literary works we today create is somewhat artificial and new, designed to suit us.

The exciting idea about Ludwig's philosophy was Wittgenstein’s reconsideration of philosophy as a sphere of presumably higher knowledge on a meta-level.in his last thoughts On Certainty (1952). Wittgenstein wonders whether philosophy is all that complex. He considers that epistemology might instead be a limited game among thousands of other games. We get the example of the two philosophers sitting in a garden and doubting that the tree in front of their eyes does exist. From the man who passes the garden and overhears them, they are mad. They answer that they are just philosophizing, and the man understands that they are not insane but playing this particular game. (Wittgenstein, Hacker and Schulte, n.d.) Wittgenstein is intriguingly ready to see it not above other games but rather in between. The philosophers can play it and get into the regular games from one second to the next.

Having mentioned my most exciting ideas about Wittgenstein's philosophy, I feel that Wittgenstein is less useful as a philosopher who gives us a statement you can adopt and look at every day. He is somewhat helpful as someone who observes what you are doing and offers you to consider your moves. Ludwig is inspiring with his offers to change the point of view. He assumes that we are working in rather small games, even where we think about everything and the universe.

References

Wittgenstein, L., 2008. Preliminary Studies For The Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L., Wright, G., Rhees, R., and Anscombe, G., 2001. Remarks On The Foundations Of Mathematics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Wittgenstein, L., Hacker, P. and Schulte, J., n.d. Philosophical Investigations.