Ludwig Wittgenstein

(26 April, 1889 – 29 April, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. As one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, his influence has been wide-ranging.

Before his death at the age of 62, the only book-length work Wittgenstein had published was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He worked on Philosophical Investigations (1953), and in 1999 it was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy.

Life
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, to Karl Wittgenstein and his wife Leopoldine Kalmus. His father was Jewish and his mother Roman Catholic. He was the youngest of eight children, born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Ludwig was born in the Palais Wittgenstein at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the Karlskirche (St. Charles's Church, Vienna). There were nine children in Ludwig's family. There were four girls: Hermine, Margaret (Gretl)—who was analysed by Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s—Helene, and a fourth daughter who died as a baby; and five boys: Johannes (Hans), Kurt, Rudolf (Rudi), and Paul, who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in the war, and for whom a number of composers wrote works for left hand (the most famous of which was Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand). Ludwig was the youngest of the family. Ludwig's father became an industrialist and went on to make a fortune in iron and steel. Ludwig's mother was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The Wittgenstein children were baptized as Roman Catholics—the faith of their maternal grandmother—and Ludwig was given a Roman Catholic burial upon his death.

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fideism

In Christian theology, fideism is any of several belief systems which hold, on various grounds, that reason is irrelevant to religious faith. According to some versions of fideism, reason is the antithesis of faith; according to others, faith is prior to or beyond reason, and therefore is unable to be proven or disproven by it.The word is also occasionally used to refer to the Protestant belief that Christians are saved by faith alone: for which see solā fide. This position is sometimes called solifidianism.

Blaise Pascal believed that direct arguments for the existence of God were futile, so he argued instead that religious practice was a good idea.

Fideism is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths (see natural theology). The word fideism comes from fides, the Latin word for faith, and literally means "faith-ism."

Theologians and philosophers have responded in various ways to the place of faith and reason in determining the truth of metaphysical ideas, morality, and religious beliefs. The term fideist, one who argues for fideism, is very rarely self applied. Support of fideism is most commonly ascribed to four philosophers: Pascal, Kierkegaard, William James, and Wittgenstein; with fideism being a label applied in a negative sense by their opponents, but which is not supported by their own ideas and works. There are a number of different forms of fideism.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April, 1889 – 29 April, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. As one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, his influence has been wide-ranging.

Before his death at the age of 62, the only book-length work Wittgenstein had published was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He worked on Philosophical Investigations in his later years, and it was published shortly after he died. Both of these works are regarded as highly influential in analytic philosophy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, to Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. He was the youngest of eight children, born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father's parents, Hermann Christian and Fanny Wittgenstein, were born into Jewish families but later converted to Protestantism, and after they moved from Saxony to Vienna in the 1850s, assimilated into the Viennese Protestant professional classes. Ludwig's father, Karl Wittgenstein, became an industrialist and went on to make a fortune in iron and steel. Ludwig's mother Leopoldine, born Kalmus, was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich von Hayek. Despite Karl's Protestantism, and the fact that Leopoldine's father was Jewish, the Wittgenstein children were baptized as Roman Catholics—the faith of their maternal grandmother—and Ludwig was given a Roman Catholic burial upon his death.

His notebook entries during the war reflect his contempt for the baseness, as he saw it, of his fellow soldiers. Throughout the war, Wittgenstein kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical and religious reflections alongside personal remarks. The notebooks reflect a profound change in his religious life: a militant atheist during his stint at Cambridge, Wittgenstein discovered Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Galicia. He devoured Tolstoy's commentary and became an evangelist of sorts; he carried the book everywhere he went and recommended it to anyone in distress (to the point that he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels"). Monk notes that at the end of his life, Wittgenstein still firmly believed in the Resurrection of Jesus. Wittgenstein's other religious influences include Saint Augustine, Fyodor Dostoevsky and, most notably, SØren Kierkegaard, whom Wittgenstein referred to as "a saint".

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