Uncyclopedia:Featured articles/September 18
Ludwig Hieronymus Kashmir Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) – also known as the "Rock Star of Modern Philosophy", on account of his uncanny resemblance to David Bowie – was an extraordinarily deep thinker whom no one (not even fellow philosophers) claimed to understand fully during his lifetime. This might have had something to do with his very strong Austrian accent but no one is sure.
Moreover, Wittgenstein is widely thought to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century and his philosophical insights have a profound and incalculable significance for many different areas of human endeavor (e.g., gurning, charades, bee-keeping, self-flagellation, cutting toenails, ping-pong). On the other hand, he is thought by many door-to-door salesmen, greengrocers and other non-intellectual persons who have very little interest in or knowledge of philosophy to be a 20th-century Hungarian pianist. Some taxi-drivers (see below) interviewed as part of the very extensive and exhaustive in-depth research carried out for the purposes of this article confessed, rather shamefacedly, that they had never heard of him. So much the worse for them. Ignoramuses.
As all intelligent and well-informed people know, Wittgenstein, as well as being a lifelong enemy of all forms of intellectual snobbery, was the author of some of the most important philosophical works ever, which no one understood except for his now-dead students and a number of clones called "Wittgensteinians", philosophical successors who dress exactly the way Wittgenstein used to (sports jacket, open-neck shirt, Lederhosen, high-heeled walking boots) and earn huge amounts pretending they understand his ideas through the "bewitchment" of language (by which he meant ... er, see below somewhere). Further complicating the matter, all these works except the last one ("Philosophical Invaginations", 1953) have now been demonstrated by precocious schoolchildren – "A six-year-old child knows as much about philosophy as Wittgenstein," said Ronnie Tomkins, a six-year-old child – to have the truth content of a Tory Party election manifesto (i.e., roughly zero). (Full article...)