20 · Philosophers
Philosophers
Wittgenstein learned from Frege and Russell, argued with Ramsey and Sraffa, and left students and readers who took his ideas in very different directions. These pages show what each of them took from him and where they parted ways.
Influence
Gottlob Frege
The logician from Jena who invented modern logic and sent the young Wittgenstein to Russell. Wittgenstein admired him all his life and argued with him all his life.
Bertrand Russell
Wittgenstein's teacher in Cambridge, then his collaborator, then his sharpest critic's target. Russell gave him logical analysis and lived to dislike what he made of it.
Frank Ramsey
The Cambridge prodigy who translated the Tractatus as an undergraduate, then spotted the cracks in it. Wittgenstein named him in the preface to the Investigations.
Piero Sraffa
An Italian economist who wrote almost nothing about philosophy, yet Wittgenstein credited him with the most consequential ideas of the Philosophical Investigations.
Student
Elizabeth Anscombe
Wittgenstein's student, friend and translator, who used his methods to found the modern philosophy of action and to reopen ethics, while holding views he never shared.
Georg Henrik von Wright
The Finnish logician who succeeded Wittgenstein at Cambridge, spent fifty years editing his manuscripts and built a philosophy that was faithful to him in spirit, not in style.
Norman Malcolm
The American student and friend whose memoir gave readers Wittgenstein the person, whose house in Ithaca gave birth to On Certainty, and who sometimes went where Wittgenstein would not follow.
Heir
The Vienna Circle
The philosophers and scientists around Moritz Schlick who made the Tractatus a founding text of logical positivism. Wittgenstein thought they had missed its point.
Gilbert Ryle
The Oxford philosopher who called the Cartesian mind a ghost in the machine. A friend of Wittgenstein who walked a parallel path, more systematic and more confident.
J. L. Austin
The Oxford philosopher who showed that some sentences do not describe anything but do something. A cousin of Wittgenstein's language games, raised in a very different house.
Peter Winch
The British philosopher who argued that understanding a society means grasping its rules, not measuring it like a natural phenomenon, and who set off a decades-long quarrel about relativism.
Saul Kripke
Kripke turned Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following into a sceptical paradox about meaning, with a community-based solution. His "Kripkenstein" is one of the most debated readings in philosophy.
Stanley Cavell
The Harvard philosopher who read the Investigations as a work about the human voice, and who argued that scepticism is not a mistake to be refuted but a standing human temptation.
Richard Rorty
The American pragmatist who ranked Wittgenstein among the three great philosophers of the century and recruited him to the cause of giving up foundations, with a twist many readers reject.
P.M.S. Hacker
The Oxford philosopher who, with Gordon Baker, wrote the great commentary on the Investigations, and then turned Wittgenstein's method on neuroscience.
Cora Diamond & James Conant
The two philosophers behind the resolute reading of the Tractatus: its nonsense is plain nonsense, and the book works as therapy rather than as hidden metaphysics.
John McDowell
The Pittsburgh philosopher who read Wittgenstein's rule-following remarks against Kripke and turned the therapeutic method on the relation between mind and world.
Jean-François Lyotard
The French philosopher who turned Wittgenstein's language games into a diagnosis of postmodern culture, and then into a philosophy of the differend.
Jacques Bouveresse
The Collège de France professor who made Wittgenstein a serious presence in French philosophy and turned his critical spirit on intellectual fashion.
Thomas S. Kuhn
The historian of science who borrowed Wittgenstein's family resemblance and duck-rabbit to explain how scientists share paradigms and how revolutions change what they see.