Talk:Ludwig Wittgenstein

Incorrect information in the article.

Section 1906 - 1913 "University", subsection "Engineering at Berlin and Manchester", second to last paragraph. Where it says "It was at this time that he became interested in the foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics (1903), and Gottlob Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic, vol. 1 (1893) and vol. 2 (1903)."

"The Foundations of Arithmetic" was published as a single volume in 1884. The text that Frege published in two volumes, one in 1893 and the second in 1903 was "The Basic Laws of Arithmetic", or Grundgesetze der Arithmetik in german. Although the titles are similar, these books are entirely different.

According to Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, chapter 2 "Manchester", it was indeed the Grundgesetze that Wittgenstein had read, since this is the book that Russell references in "The Principles of Mathematics". Cazoix (talk) 21:20, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Citation style

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I think it should probably be written about how Wittgenstein affects everyday life today, what practical meaning his efforts have.

Any computer programming language that you create programs with is based on Wittgenstein's logic but also the structure that you have to understand. A logic where e.g. if A applies then B does not apply e.g. in statements like if(), for() and while().

I also see it as, for example, a storyboard for a film or book that we are working on today, could not have been like that without Wittgenstein.

The whole of modern linguistics has made enormous progress in the last 100 years with the help of Wittgenstein.

However, one area that could be renewed and revolutionized through the application of Wittgenstein's efforts is law, where there is a fundamental problem and that is the understanding of legislation and what meaning it has and how it could logically be constructed so that it is not communicating not just for the lawyers but also, government officials, individuals and not least politicians.

The second reason for rewriting the entire statute book is the last 50 years of advances in information technology where modern web-based means can create a much more accessible legislation. But also which is integrated in e.g. computer-supported processing systems in the exercise of authority in state and municipality.

I perceive it as the legal profession seeing their jobs threatened by changes. Which is a major safety risk to the public. Zzalpha (talk) 23:01, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

"She was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich Hayek on her maternal side"

Was the line about Wittgenstein's Catholic grandma supposed to read "She was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich Hayek on his maternal side"? A nephew is a relative through one's sibling, which makes "maternal side" a senseless modifier. HermannusAlemannus (talk) 10:30, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Hertz and Bildtheorie

I have two questions:

• How do you translate "picture theory" as in picture theory of language? what is the actual German word used here (Bildtheorie)? Was "Bildtheorie" ever used by Wittgenstein?
• Why is there no mention of Heinrich Hertz in this article or the picture theory one? Apparently Wittgenstein was inspired by him.

Philosophy is not my field but I can help find sources if that is what is missing. ReyHahn (talk) 19:36, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed that question two is answered by the infobox under "influences". However the question now goes into why some of those names are not named in this article or in any of the articles related to his work.--ReyHahn (talk) 09:46, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Religion

Why does the Wittgenstein article link to various categories of Judaism articles but no category of Catholic articles? Asking as an atheist who has noticed Wittgenstein practicing Franciscan virtues in his visitations to the sick and lonely in Irish nursing and old age homes, and on other occasions in his biography. Pascalulu88 (talk) 01:27, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

He was Jewish by ancestry, to the tune of three out of four grandparents. He was baptised and brought up as a Roman Catholic but did not practise Roman Catholicism as an adult, though he did retain a slightly weird interest in the idea of 'confession'. He and his family always said they were Jewish, and their paternal family name was in fact Meyer, 'Wittgenstein' being adopted by their great-grandfather after his employers, the princely Sayn-Wittgenstein family (which would go on to produce a famous Nazi night-fighter ace pilot, Heinrich Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, shot down and killed by an RAF air gunner in 1944). Since 1945, Jewishness has been largely defined by ancestry -- in effect according to whether the Nazis would have considered you Jewish (and marked you for death) or not. Up to 1933, German and Austrian Jews often believed they could stop being Jewish by practising Christianity, but, when the Gestapo came to call, they found out that this was not the case and they were required to carry Jewish identity documents. Which has influenced both Jewish and non-Jewish thinking on the matter. Khamba Tendal (talk) 18:21, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm not questioning his Jewish connections. Just mentioning that he was technically Catholic and from reading accounts of his conversations with his Irish friends, esp. Maurice O'Connor Drury, it's obvious that he did think seriously about Christianity. He stated his preference for Matthew's Gospel over the others and had problems with John's Gospel because of its inconsistencies with the other three but he concluded that his difficulty with this Gospel was "as nothing" because "if you can accept the miracle that God became man...it is impossible for me to say what form the record of such an event should take." And also, "When I was a prisoner of war in Italy, I was very glad when we were compelled to attend Mass." He was undecided about it and satisfied to remain undecided.

I'm completely agnostic but I think that Christianity has become increasingly marginalized as a topic to be taken seriously by Western White intellectuals but Wikipedia is not obliged to ignore certain historically important belief systems simply because they're unfashionable. Wittgenstein did not disparage it and I don't think it would do any harm to add "Low-importance Catholic articles" to his already long list of categories. Pascalulu88 (talk) 20:20, 9 October 2023 (UTC)