No person could reasonably claim to have the answer to the meaning of life. An even more daring claim is to know what meaning is at all. What is the meaning of these very words? Of language as a whole ...

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. My preoccupation with writing about meaning, love, and happiness derives from my desire to ...

The best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had avoided philosophy of language as simply being too esoteric and hermetic to be of use. David Pears, ...

Anthony Gottlieb, writing in the magazine this week on Alexander Waugh’s “The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War,” relates an amusing anecdote about the famously ascetic Ludwig: when he was a ...

Philosophy has always had to defend itself against the charge that it is empty verbiage, unscientific speculation. Philosophers themselves are often the harshest and most astute critics of their own ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) sought to lead us beyond the long fantasy — so dominant in philosophy — that a single mind can figure everything out. Rather, we need the greater unity of genuine ...

Fearing for his life, tormented by sex: the great philosopher bares his soul in his diaries, finally decoded and translated after 100 years Ivan Hewett is The Telegraph’s Classical Music Critic and an ...

No one expects contemporary philosophers to be more than mildly eccentric. Creatures of the modern academy, they have careers, not vocations. Some mixture of incentive and professional obligation ...