Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born to an aristocratic family in Vienna, 26 April 1889. He was the youngest of eight very precocious children, and was preoccupied all his life with questions of genius, artistic creativity and suicide. During the 1930s and 1940s he wrote a great deal in the form of remarks, aphorisms and fragments; but none of this work was published during his lifetime. A large part of what was to become his second major work, the Philosophical Investigations, was compiled by 1945, but was not published until 1953, two years after his death. Wittgenstein is rarely considered an educational thinker per se. Except for a few comments and aphorisms, he wrote very little about the topic. The Investigations self-reflectively mirrors and models the multiplicity of language-games and gestures it attempts to describe. An appreciation of Wittgenstein's philosophical style leads people directly to an understanding of the fundamentally pedagogical nature of his endeavour.