Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian and English philosopher (1889-1951). The only work he published in his lifetime was TractatusLogicoPhilosophicus. He was a professor of philosophy at the UniversityOfCambridge? in the UnitedKingdom, and succeeded by GeorgHenrikVonWright?. The UniversityOfBergen? in Bergen, Norway has published a CDROM electronic edition of Wittgenstein's Nachlass, http://www.hit.uib.no/wab/.

One of Wittgenstein's more famous students was AlanTuring. The TuringTest can be seen as an application of the philosophy of the LateWittgenstein to the problem of artificial intelligence. -- BretPettichord

"By his own philosophical work and through his influence on several generations of other thinkers, Wittgenstein transformed the nature of philosophical activity in the English-speaking world. From two distinct approaches, he sought to show that traditional philosophical problems can be avoided entirely by application of an appropriate methodology, one that focuses on analysis of language."

"On Wittgenstein's view, the world consists entirely of facts."

(Tractatus 1.1) "Human beings are aware of the facts by virtue of our mental representations or thoughts, which are most fruitfully understood as picturing the way things are."

(Tractatus 2.1) "These thoughts are, in turn, expressed in propositions, whose form indicates the position of these facts within the nature of reality as a whole and whose content presents the truth-conditions under which they correspond to that reality."

(Tractatus 4) "Everything that is true—that is, all the facts that constitute the world—can in principle be expressed by atomic sentences. Imagine a comprehensive list of all the true sentences. They would picture all of the facts there are, and this would be an adequate representation of the world as a whole."

from: http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6s.htm

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