Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who produced two radically different philosophies in succession and is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus argued that language is a logical picture of the world and that philosophy's task is to clarify the limits of what can meaningfully be said. His later Philosophical Investigations rejected almost everything in the Tractatus, arguing instead that meaning is use, and that philosophical problems are confusions generated by misunderstanding how language functions in forms of life.