Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.

The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.

Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"

For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.

If you ask philosophers – those in the English speaking analytic tradition anyway – who is the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, they will most likely name Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the chances are that if you ask them exactly why he was so important, they will be unable to tell you. Moreover, in their own philosophical practice it will be rare, certainly these days, that they mention him or his work. Indeed, they may very fluently introduce positions, against which Wittgenstein launched powerful arguments: the very arguments which, by general agreement, make him such an important philosopher. Contemporary philosophers don't argue with Wittgenstein. Rather they bypass him. Wittgenstein has a deeply ambivalent status – he has authority, but not influence.

Wittgenstein was right when he said that the limits of our world are identical with the limits of our language, and, I would add, there is on an everyday level clear interaction between one's language and one's patterns of thought.

What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to "live" truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness. Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud.

He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don't appreciate that.

Three years after Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was verified by Eddington, ending belief in fixed space and time, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the key figures of our period, published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which cumulatively over the decades tended to destroy confidence in philosophy as a guide to human reason. For half a century Wittgenstein’s influence on academic philosophy was immense. By the early 1990s doubts were raised about his sanity: was he a genius, or simply a madman? But by then much damage had been done. A leading Logical Positivist like Sir A.J. Ayer, who at the time of his death in 1989 was widely regarded as the world’s leading philosopher, remarked with some complacency that philosophy demonstrated that man was ignorant rather than knowledgeable: ‘[It] tends to show that we can’t really know lots of things which we think we know.’ Empirical popular knowledge, usually termed ‘common sense’, had been dismissed contemptuously by Bertrand Russell as ‘the metaphysics of savages’.

Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.

My wife gave him some Swiss cheese and rye bread for lunch, which he greatly liked. Thereafter he more or less insisted on eating bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes that my wife prepared. Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it always remained the same. When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I sometimes exclaimed "Hot Ziggety!" — a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in Kansas. Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to hear him exclaim "Hot Ziggety!" when my wife put the bread and cheese before him.

Lately, the one person that's meant a lot to me is Wittgenstein. I think his remarks on color turn into some of the most beautiful poetry I've ever read. People call Wittgenstein a philosopher and I call him a poet.

Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein's character is with the photographs that exist of his face.

I began by asking whether Wittgenstein was a spiritual genius. That question really has two parts: was he the spiritually sublime individual – the ‘saint’ – people often said he was? And did he know how to be such an individual, whether or not he was one himself? I think the answer must be no to both questions. His vanity, emotional solipsism and coldness put him well outside the category of the saint; and his engineering (or surgical) approach to his spiritual condition seems to me wrongly conceived, embodying as it does a deep mistake of ethical attention. But a better question might be this: given his nature, did he live a noble and ethically distinguished life? (He clearly lived an impressive and remarkable one.) Here I think we must do him the courtesy of taking him at his word and not allow our natural sentimentality about great men to get in the way of hearing what he actually says about himself. Of Moore's reputation for saintly childlike innocence, Wittgenstein remarked: ‘I can’t understand that, unless it’s also to a child’s credit. For you aren’t talking of the innocence a man has fought for, but of an innocence which comes from a natural absence of temptation.’ If we take seriously Wittgenstein's own repeated assessment of himself as ‘rotten’ and ‘indecent’, as having a ‘wicked heart’ – in whatever way these epithets were meant – then it becomes clear why he regarded his life as a mighty struggle with himself, and what he had to overcome to achieve the moral standing he did. His peculiar greatness comes from that agonising battle between his natural hubris and the humility he craved, between his compulsive devotion to himself and his willed concern for others. The singularity of his spiritual achievement consists in this strained amalgamation of aggressive megalomania and abject self-mortification. Somehow this battle brought something spiritually valuable into the world that had not been there before: an ability, we might say, to attend religiously to the face of another human being – but to do so as if this were the strangest and most impossible thing in the world to achieve.

Consider Wittgenstein's paradigmatic question about defining "game." The problem is that there is no property common to all games, so that the most usual kinds of definition fail. Not every game has a ball, nor two competing teams; even, sometimes, there is no notion of "winning." In my view, the explanation is that a word like "game" points to a somewhat diffuse "system" of prototype frames, among which some frame-shifts are easy, but others involve more strain.

Wittgenstein used the analogy of games to describe the various uses of language. We use language to inform, ask, command, entertain, speculate, curse, joke, agree, reminisce, play, emote... [etc.] There is no single feature shared by all of these.., Wittgenstein claimed; just as games lack a mutually defining feature.., language, in its great variety, has no essence. He therefore called [its] uses... 'language games'. ...The point..: if language has no essence one cannot give a systematic theory to... how it works. He was trying to bring philosophical speculation about meaning to an end.Is Wittgenstein right..? It is a good game trying to prove him wrong, and needs no equipment except a brain. ...[L]ike many ...games, it has a serious and useful point.

Wittgenstein's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual Gemeinschaft, of custom-based concepts rather than statute-seeking Reform, and that he does so through a very general theory of meaning, rather than from the premisses habitually used for this purpose. Because there is no unique formal notation valid for all speech, each and every culture is vindicated. One never knew that could be done — and so quickly too! It is that above all which endows his philosophy with such a capacity to attract and to repel. His mystique of consensual custom denies that anything can sit in judgment of our concepts, that some may be more rational and others less so. So all of them are in order and have nothing to fear from philosophy, as indeed he insists. This is a fairly mild form of irrationalism, invoking no fierce dark Gods, merely a consensual community. It is the Soft Porn of Irrationalism.

I can well understand why children love sand.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

It was Wittgenstein who evacuated time from language, and thereby converted it into an ahistorical absolute. He was able to do this because he lacked any notion of contradiction. The idea that linguistic change proceeds by an internal dialectic generated by incompatibilities between different rule-systems within it, which give rose to radically new concepts at determinate historical moments, was beyond his horizon. It presupposed an idea of language as neither a monist unity (Tractatus) nor a heteroclite plurality (Investigations), but as a complex totality, necessarily inhabited by different contradictions. It is striking that today, French philosophy is largely concentrated on the problem of the conditions of appearance of new concepts—precisely the problem that English philosophy is designed to avert. The work of Canguilhem and Bachelard is a close study of the historical emergence in the west of the scientific concepts which revolutionized biology and physics. Such an inquiry is a diametric opposite of the whole drift of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and indicates its parochialism. To emphasise the social nature of language, as he did, is not enough: language is a structure with a history, and it has a history because its contradictions and discrepancies themselves are determined by other levels of social practice. The magical harmony of language affirmed by English philosophy was itself merely the transcript of a historically becalmed society.

Whereas Wittgenstein had imagined an indefinite multiplicity of language-games, incommensurable with each other, so paving the way for the particularist doctrine that the signification of sentences could only lie in their heterogeneous usages, Frege understood that language is by its nature a system, competence in which presupposes a tacit grasp of certain general principles that are never reducible to a mere tally of local utterances. At the same time, Frege's philosophy, for all its emphasis on meaning, was not only systematic, but critical. For it retained a stringent concern with truth, where the laxity of Wittgenstein's eventual pragmatics—his notion that all language-games can find their warrant in culturally variable ‘forms of life’, as apprehended by Spengler—was inevitably to afford a franchise for intellectual relativism. Initially close to Wittgenstein's legacy, Dummett came through his prolonged work on Frege to a reaffirmation of the central importance of the assertoric dimension of language—the specificity and necessity of its claims to accurate report of the world—as against the performative functions so favoured by Austin, for whom there could be no critique of current usages. Wittgenstein's basic programme thus had to be rejected: ‘philosophy cannot be content to leave everything as it is,’ for ‘linguistic practice is not immune to, and may well stand in need of, revision.’

The general method that Wittgenstein does suggest is that of 'shewing that a man has supplied no meaning [or perhaps: "no reference"] for certain signs in his sentences'. I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein's later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied: 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.' 'Well,' he asked, 'what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if' in 'it looks as if the sun goes round the earth'. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. 'Exactly!' he said. In another case, I might have found that I could not supply any meaning other than that suggested by a naive conception, which could be destroyed by a question. The naive conception is really thoughtlessness, but it may take the power of a Copernicus effectively to call it in question.

When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.

Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein's legacy will prove to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any other charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their life to disagreeing with one another (and, presumably, with my brief summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one's first exposure to either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes are gifts.

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question. Wittgenstein's response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.

What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.

This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein... If its limits—that is, the precise point at which sense becomes nonsense—could somehow be defined, then speakers would not attempt to express the inexpressible. Therefore, said Wittgenstein, do not put too great a burden upon language. Learn its limitations and try to accommodate yourself to them, for language offers all the reality you can ever hope to know.

Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.

The union of logic and empiricism was solemnized in the first really independent philosophical writings of the first man to combine the requisite logical and philosophical expertise, in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918) of Bertrand Russell. ... Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) was the first brilliant wayward child of the marriage, but the parental lineaments were more obvious in the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.

Now, as it happens, one of the very few references to any idea in the domain of sport to be found in the most orthodox type of contemporary philosophy is what Wittgenstein has to say about the concept of a game.

The landscape of language is-as Wittengenstein has it-like the oldest part of a city, original trails and cow paths interlacing as streets, a map determined not by preconceptions of urban order but by the intricate tracings of the human brain-and voice. A poem emerges as language, and the poems that most interest and engage me are poems in which several kinds of language impel you along a twisting path

[http://www.iep.utm.edu/w/wittgens.htm Wittgenstein] at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/wittgenstein.html Wittgenstein] at the TIME 100

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an extensive article.]

[http://wittgenstein.pagina.nl Wittgenstein Page] (good organised link-index on Wittgenstein)

[http://www.hit.uib.no/wab/ Wittgenstein's works are edited in an electronic edition] (and sold on CDROM) at the University of Bergen in Norway.

[http://rabbit.trin.cam.ac.uk/~stewart/Msscolls/Wittgenstein.html A collection of Ludwig Wittgenstein's manuscripts] is held by the Trinity College library in Cambridge, England.

[http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~brianwc/ludwig/index.html Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)] is a comprehensive resource of Wittgensteinian material.

[http://www.lichtensteiger.de/LWkundmanngesse.html House Wittgenstein at Kundmanngasse 19, Vienna]

[http://www.lichtensteiger.de/wittgenstein_scrap.html Wittgenstein Scrap Book by Ralph Lichtensteiger]

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ram/inourtime_20031204.ram In Our Time : Wittgenstein] Real audio stream of BBC Radio 4 programme

[http://www.handprint.com/SC/WIT/wittframe.html 32 anecdotes about Wittgenstein]

Norman Malcolm - Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir on Wikiquote

Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist ... I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written.

I got a letter from him written from Monte Cassino, saying that a few days after the Armistice, he had been taken prisoner by the Italians, but fortunately with his manuscript. It appears he had written a book in the trenches, and wished me to read it. He was the kind of man who would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. ... It was the book which was subsequently published under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Just about at the time of the Armistice his father had died, and Wittgenstein inherited the bulk of his fortune. He came to the conclusion, however, that money is a nuisance to a philosopher, so he gave every penny of it to his brother and sisters. Consequently he was unable to pay the fare from Vienna to the Hague, and was far too proud to accept it from me. ... He must have suffered during this time hunger and considerable privation, though it was very seldom that he could be induced to say anything about it, as he had the pride of Lucifer. At last his sister decided to build a house, and employed him as an architect. This gave him enough to eat for several years, at the end of which he returned to Cambridge as a don...