No person could reasonably claim to have the answer to the meaning of life. An even more daring claim is to know what meaning is at all. What is the meaning of these very words? Of language as a whole ...

The best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had avoided philosophy of language as simply being too esoteric and hermetic to be of use. David Pears, ...

How is it that false statements, such as “horses have eight legs”, can be just as meaningful as true statements, such as “horses have four legs”? Where does logical structure come from? We can ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) sought to lead us beyond the long fantasy — so dominant in philosophy — that a single mind can figure everything out. Rather, we need the greater unity of genuine ...

These journals offer a view of the philosopher’s preoccupations, his sexual anguish, his struggles with work and his time in the military. By Jennifer Szalai When you purchase an independently ...

In this day of divisive discourses and competing realities, the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein—the enigmatic iconoclast whose 75th death anniversary will be observed next week—have never seemed more ...

No one expects contemporary philosophers to be more than mildly eccentric. Creatures of the modern academy, they have careers, not vocations. Some mixture of incentive and professional obligation ...

University of Sydney provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU. The following notes on the politics of rising uncertainty and the future of democracy were prepared for the inaugural CISS ...

I read Julian Baggini’s review of the new Ludwig Wittgenstein biography with keen interest (“An Attack on the Abstract,” Bookshelf, Nov. 19). In the late 1970s I was a graduate student in the ...

Philosophy has always had to defend itself against the charge that it is empty verbiage, unscientific speculation. Philosophers themselves are often the harshest and most astute critics of their own ...