Wittgenstein Essays

Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein The connections between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Soren Kierkegaard as philosophers are not at all immediately obvious. On the surface, Wittgenstein deals with matters concerning the incorrect use of philosophical language and Kierkegaard focuses almost exclusively on answering the question 'how to become a Christian'. But this account belies deeper structural similarities between these men's important works. Thus, this paper suggests that their methods, rather than

of the Tractatus. Because The Tractatus is such a complex and cryptic book, and because Wittgenstein can be quite vague in his explanations, readers interpret it in many different ways and take different meanings from it and so objections and also defenses can be based on underlying misconceptions. In "Wittgenstein's Picture Theory of Language", David Keyt remarks that it is difficult to see how Wittgenstein meets some of the common objections to his Picture Theory. Because of this it is difficult

own view as advantageous to the alternatives. In response to this reason, Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that one of the most important aspects of communication in philosophical standpoint is grammar. It is in view of the thought that Grammar

Ludwig Wittgenstein once believed that language's function was to name objects and the meaning of language was found in the objects for which it stands. He later rejected this and centred on how language works and is used, believing that problems of religious language come from misunderstanding its usage. Wittgenstein was no longer concerned with the truth or falsity of language but the way it is used and the functions that it performs, as he said 'Don't ask for the meaning

“Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” This was the last words of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had been one of the most influential philosophers of human history. In Ray Monk’s biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, it is shown how wonderful Wittgenstein’s life was. Not that it was especially happy. It was full of personal suffering, which were mostly self-imposed. There was the fact of his Jewish ancestry, which weighed on him, and there was his strained relationship to his own sexuality

Essay, I will prove how several of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s developments concerning philosophy were influenced by his time as a soldier. The first development I will analyse is as follows; “Only death gives life it’s meaning”, found in Monk’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein” (139). The second development I will analyse is as follows; “that the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise”, found in Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicos” (181). The third

A response to the sceptic’s argument is the central point of discussion in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Wittgenstein is aware of the complexity and variance of the skeptic’s argument and tailors his response accordingly, criticizing his colleague G. E. Moore for not recognizing the point of the skeptic in saying: Now, can one enumerate what one knows (like Moore)? Straight off like that, I believe not. For otherwise the expression “I know” gets misused. And later on he notes: We just do not see

In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, he discusses and develops his view on the nature and relation of the world, fact, atomic fact, object, simplicity and complexity. Wittgenstein starts with asserting what the world is, and then builds each concept. In this paper, I will expound upon each concept and what I believe he is expressing with each one. “The world,” he claims, “is everything that is the case… [it] is the totality of facts, not of things,” (Ogden translation, 1-1.1). Things are existing in

While Heidegger and Wittgenstein agree that our own death is not an event in our lives, they come to radically different conclusions about what this concept entails. We constantly live with death and that we are constantly 'dying' in a metaphoric sense, Heidegger says, whereas Wittgenstein implies the opposite and [basically] says that death is not our business; that death belongs to the dead and "eternal

Investigations is an inherently pedagogical work. Wittgenstein claims throughout his later writings to be teaching a method and this method is both philosophical and pedagogical. It is the claim of this paper that if we do not take Wittgenstein's methodological claim seriously, we do not engage with the text in the manner for which it was written. Consequently, we begin and end in the wrong places and the text becomes (in the words of Wittgenstein) 'variously misunderstood, more or less mangled and