Understanding Wittgenstein

Asks a reader:

I need some help understanding Ludwig Wittgenstein. What is he trying to say?

Wittgenstein is one of the break-through philosophers of the 20th century. By putting moral issues on a linguistic plane, he seemed to eliminate entire classes of questions as undefinable and thus unsolvable.

He had a Nietsche-like aphoristic style of writing. From his 1914-1916 notebooks.

"Eine der schwersten Aufgaben des Philosophen ist zu finden, wo ihn der Schuh druckt. Man versucht oft, zu grosse Gedankenlufte zu uberspringen und fallt dann mitten hinen.

"One of the most difficult of the philosospher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches. One often tries to jump over too wide chasms of thought and then falls in."

Here are more examples.

Perhaps his most famous aphorism is: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" where "speaking" is the formulation of a moral claim and "silence" is the inability to intelligibly resolve that claim. Wittgenstein forced a precision with the use of language that heretofore didn't exist, for example, in the consideration of these two sentences: "What is time" and "What is the time?" It is an over-simplification that he demolished logical positivism. To the contrary, he complimented Russell's work, for example, in Russell's "Theory of Definitions" and in his application of modal logic.

Videos of discussions of Wittgenstein, his work, and his ideas.

Anthony Quinton on Wittgenstein

John Serle on Wittgenstein

A book review in The New York Times on The House of Wittgenstein