Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (889 – 1951) was a school teacher, engineer and philosopher and is often considered the most important/influential philosopher of the 20th Century.
Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, Austria (and for a time attended the same school as Adolf Hitler). He inherited a fortune, which he gave away. He studied mechanical engineering in England, before shifting to philosophy and going to Cambridge to study under Bertrand Russell. After writing his first book (drafted while he was a soldier in world war 1), the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he delayed publication and went to work as a teacher.
After his work had eventually been published and had led to much attention to his ideas, especially among the logical positivists, Wittgenstein took up a teaching post at Cambridge, as a Fellow of Trinity College, and later was elected to Professor of Philosophy.
Wittgenstein's second book, The Philosophical Investigations took a very different view than his first (abandoning the search for tying language to a formal logic, and introducing hte notion of language games which are shared within a culture), and again publication was delayed by the author – this time till after his death. If anything, it become even more influential than his first.
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