The Argument Of The Tractatus

The Argument of the “Tractatus” presents a single unified interpretation of the Tractatus based on Wittgenstein’s own view that the philosophy of logic is the real foundation of his philosophical system. It demonstrates that on this interpretation Wittgenstein’s views are far more visionary and relevant to contemporary discussions than has been suspected. A case in point is a new interpretation of Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning that is shown to illuminate the views of a series of philosophers, including Brentano, the early Russell, Chomsky, Fodor, Katz, Kripke, Malcolm, and Dummett. McDonough’s interpretation sheds new light on the connection between Wittgenstein’s work and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophical tradition, and it facilitates a clear resolution of the controversy over the relation between Wittgenstein’s own early and later philosophies. The Argument of the “Tractatus” is an excellent introduction to the field of twentieth-century analytical philosophy. It treats a wide range of authors and topics, including the foundations of logic, the theory of meaning, the disputes concerning atomistic versus holistic conceptions of language, the nature of the mental, the foundations of psycho-linguistics, the theory of communication, and the nature of philosophical systems.

This introduction, first published in 2005, considers the philosophical and literary aspects of Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus' and shows how they are related.

DER TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS oder kurz Tractatus (ursprünglicher deutscher Titel: Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung) ist das erste Hauptwerk des österreichischen Philosophen Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Wie im Titel des Buches angedeutet, enthält es zum einen eine logische Theorie, zum anderen legt Wittgenstein darin eine philosophische Methode dar. „Das Buch will also dem Denken eine Grenze ziehen, oder vielmehr – nicht dem Denken, sondern dem Ausdruck der Gedanken: „Denn um dem Denken eine Grenze zu ziehen, müssten wir beide Seiten dieser Grenze denken können.“ (Vorwort). Wittgensteins Hauptanliegen ist es, die Philosophie von Unsinn und Verwirrung zu bereinigen, denn „[d]ie meisten Sätze und Fragen, welche über philosophische Dinge geschrieben worden sind, sind nicht falsch, sondern unsinnig. Wir können daher Fragen dieser Art überhaupt nicht beantworten, sondern nur ihre Unsinnigkeit feststellen. Die meisten Fragen und Sätze der Philosophen beruhen darauf, dass wir unsere Sprachlogik nicht verstehen.“ (Vorwort)

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was first published in German in 1921, then translated and published into English in 1922 by C. K. Ogden, with help from F. P. Ramsey, and supervised by Wittgenstein. Tractatus revolves around seven basic propositions and begins to branch off from these propositions to illustrate the relations between words and objects. From this, Wittgenstein applies his connections into the philosophy of language and symbolism to show how the problems of philosophy arise from misuses of language. To Wittgenstein, "Philosophy is not a theory, but an activity." As it is an activity, philosophy must undergo the process of dissolving misuses of logic. Proclaiming philosophy is a matter of logic instead of metaphysics, too, ethics and aesthetics become inexpressible in the form of the spoken propositional logic. From this grounding of philosophy needing to undergo a subversive process of logic, Wittgenstein traverses many subjects from physics and death, the mystical and metaphysical, to the pictorial to imaginary. Even as the only book he published in his lifetime, it stands as one of the most important texts of the 20th century.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a succinct yet wide-ranging exploration of language and logic, science and mysticism, which has inspired generations of thinkers, artists and poets. In a series of short, bold statements, Wittgenstein seeks to define the limits of language, its relation to logic, its power and its inherent failings. Originally published in the early 1920s, it is the only book-length work the renowned philosopher published in his lifetime. In this thrilling new translation, Alexander Booth displays an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtle influence on Wittgenstein's gem-like prose - at once specialist and, often, remarkably plain-spoken - of his background in mechanical engineering, while highlighting the underlying poetry of this seminal text.

Explores the complex nature of truth in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

José L. Zalabardo puts forward a new interpretation of central ideas in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning the structure of reality and our representations of it in thought and language. He shows the origins of Wittgenstein's picture theory of propositional representation in Russell's theories of judgment, arguing that the picture theory is Wittgenstein's solution to some of the problems that he found in Russell's position. Zalabardo defends the view that, for Wittgenstein, facts in general, and the facts that play the role of propositions in particular, are not composite items, arising from the combination of their constituents. They are ultimate, irreducible units, and what we think of as their constituents are features that facts have in common with one another. These common features have built into them their possibilities of combination with other features into possible situations. This is the source of the Tractarian account of non-actual possibilities. It is also the source of the idea that it is not possible to produce propositions answering to certain descriptions, including those that would give rise to Russell's paradox. Zalabardo then considers Wittgenstein's view that every proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions. He argues that this view is motivated by Wittgenstein's epistemology of logic, according to which we should be able to see logical relations by inspecting the structures of propositions. Finally, Zalabardo considers the problems that we face if we try to extend the application of the picture theory from elementary propositions to truth functions of these.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the greatest and most fascinating philosophers of all time. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, composed in a series of remarkable numbered propositions, was the only book he published in his lifetime. He tackles nothing less than the question of whether there is such a thing as a logically perfect language and, armed with it, what we can say about the nature of the world itself. Pushing the limits of language, logic and philosophy, the Tractatus is a brilliant, cryptic and hypnotic tour de force, exerting a major impact on twentieth-century philosophy and stirring the imagination today. With a new foreword by Ray Monk.