A private life
When Ludwig Wittgenstein died in 1951, he had only published one book — the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was first translated into English in 1922 (with an introduction by Wittgenstein’s former professor and mentor Bertrand Russell, to which Wittgenstein strongly objected). Philosophical Investigations, which Wittgenstein was working on at the time of his death, was published in 1953. His wartime notebooks, which he kept between 1914 and 1916, appeared in 1961. These are important. The Tractatus is famously dense, being composed of a series of statements on the relationship between words and objects and the nature of knowledge. The notebooks provide a clearer sense of the problem Wittgenstein was trying to solve and the progression of his thought.
