Ludwig Wittgenstein Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian philosopher well known for his work in a number of fields including logic, language, and mathematics. He studied engineering at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1908 and then moved to Manchester, England, where he engaged in aeronautical research. While studying in England, he met British philosopher and logician Lord Bertrand Russell, whose influence led to Wittgenstein’s move into the study of mathematical philosophy.

During World War I (1914–1918), Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army. While in the field he wrote Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921). The book describes his picture theory of language in which the words of a language were mental pictures in the mind that actually mirrored the realities of the world. After the war, he came in contact with the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers whose logical positivism, an attempt to reconceptualize empiricism using contemporary scientific advances based on the theory that knowledge comes only from the five senses, was derived from a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s thought.

In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge University and became a professor there in 1939. During his tenure at the university, two notebooks, the Blue Book and the Brown Book, were circulated among students of language. These notebooks expressed radical revisions of Wittgenstein’s earlier thought.

Wittgenstein died of cancer on April 29, 1951, at Cambridge. After his death his latest philosophical ideas were published in 1953 in Philosophical Investigations. In this work he made unique contributions in the areas of logic and the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein theorized that most philosophical problems are due to linguistic confusions. Communication takes place in “language games” that have their own rules, which means that languages such as French or Hindi have different rules of grammar that are like the differences in the rules of soccer or basketball.

Although Wittgenstein’s political views were sympathetic to the communism of the 1930s, politics was not a major focus of his. However, his thought has been used to discuss political issues. For example, human rights cannot be explored or explained using the five senses. Some linguistic philosophers and positivist legal thinkers would, as a consequence, argue that claims to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are merely expressions of emotions or matters of taste and do not represent anything substantial in reality. However, the failure to defend human rights has often had dreadful consequences throughout history. Rights are claims that people make that have powerful consequences. Duties are correlatives to rights. If there is a right, then someone else has a duty to protect that right. To attribute disputes about rights to the linguistic confusion that sometimes occurs in political issues is, in the view of many political theorists, a failure to understand that rights rest upon God, nature, or human nature and not the use of words.

For analytic philosophy the confusion over the great variety of conflicting meanings for words such as freedom (which has more than two hundred meanings), power, justice, and rights are the result of verbal misunderstandings. However, political theorists believe that there is something permanently substantial at stake in these words because they point to different aspects of the richness of the human experiences of freedom.

Bibliography:

Grayling, A. C. Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Heyes, Cressida J., ed. Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Holt, Robin. Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights. Oxford, U.K.: Taylor and Francis, 1997.

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