How is it that false statements, such as “horses have eight legs”, can be just as meaningful as true statements, such as “horses have four legs”? Where does logical structure come from? We can ...

Philosophy often flourishes in the aftermath of wars, especially lost wars. Socrates served in the losing Athenian army in the Peloponnesian War; Thomas Hobbes wrote “Leviathan” while in exile in ...

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 ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. The best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had ...

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 ...

These journals offer a view of the philosopher’s preoccupations, his sexual anguish, his struggles with work and his time in the military. By Jennifer Szalai When you purchase an independently ...

In the rarefied world of Wittgenstein scholarship it is little short of astonishing: an untapped, lost archive of original material which provides fresh insights into the utterly brilliant but ...

If there is one meeting of minds I’d love to drag out of history and into the AI era, it would be that shared by Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The real-life hookups between the young father of ...

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 ...