Ludwig Wittgenstein completed the only work published in his lifetime at the age of 32. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is seen as one of the key philosophical works of the 20th century.

Believing he had disposed of the key questions of philosophy in less than seventy pages of terse propositions, Wittgenstein returned to Austria for some years and became a taciturn primary school teacher.

It was in the trenches of the first world war that Wittgenstein developed his 'picture theory' of propositions which is central to the Tractatus ...

Wittgenstein could hardly have forseen the flowering of pictures on the internet, although proposition 6.341 might presage the invention of digital images.

Sometimes by design and sometimes by accident, thousands of webcams are constantly 'depicting reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs.' (2.201)

Now watch and read on ...