Peter Hacker: Wittgenstein and his impact upon Anglophone philosophy

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

In this talk, the salient achievements of Wittgenstein's two masterpieces, the Tractatus and the Investigations will be surveyed and their influences on Anglophone and European philosophy recounted. Wittgenstein dominated fifty years of 20th century philosophy, from the 1920s to the 1970s. The declining influence of his work today will be explained and the concomitant losses to philosophy will be rehearsed.

Peter Hacker was Fellow in Philosophy at St John's College, Oxford from 1966 to 2006, where he is now an Emeritus Fellow. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury from 2013 to 2016. He was appointed to an Honorary Professorship at the UCL Institute of Neurology from 2019-2024. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. He is author or co-author of 25 books, editor or co-editor of four books, and author of 175 papers. His main contributions to philosophy lie in his work on Wittgenstein, his writings (together with the great Australian neuroscientist Maxwell Bennett) on philosophy and neuroscience, and his tetralogy on human nature. His most recent book is Solving, Resolving, and Dissolving Philosophy Problems: Essays in Connective, Contrastive, and Contextual Analysis (2025).

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