Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: PhD Thesis of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Essays in Philosophy, 2004

This Dover edition of the Tractatus is an unabridged republication of the English translation by C. K. Ogden and the Introduction by Bertrand Russell. It includes the index from the 1955 printing by Kegan and Paul and a Publisher's Note.

Readers beware! This book is other than it first seems. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s latest philosophical offering is unlike anything that we have had from him to date. Its preface warns that the Tractatus is no textbook. This is an extreme understatement; really it is a deep puzzle – one that must be handled with great care. However it is best read, there can be no denying that, in its own special way, the Tractatus powerfully makes us focus afresh on deeply problematic assumptions at the very heart of the major approaches in today’s analytic philosophy. It forces us to fundamentally review and possibly rethink our self-understanding of our methods and what it is possible to do in philosophy.

By the beginning of the 20 th century, when Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the prevailing philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford was the Hegelian brand of idealism. This book was a culmination of a spirited revolt, initiated by George Edward Moore and Bertrand Russell, against Hegelianism. These two philosophers championed a return to the traditional British empiricism, a move that paved the way for the birth of a philosophical analysis movement and subsequently influenced Wittgenstein to write his masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The central thesis of this book is the picture theory. Wittgenstein argues that the task of philosophy is to analyse language so that it may be used to describe the world. If language is not used in this manner, its enunciations would be rendered nonsensical.

2008

to biases or distortions by vividness. So hot coherence needs to be (further) constrained by procedures that will test our intuitive feelings to see whether they are properly informed, factually and normatively, and that will also aim to structure our reasoning so that informed intuitions can be effective rather than be overcome by the uninformed gut feelings they were meant to replace. Crucially, also, the inner workings of HOTCO inferences will often not be transparent to us; we may only have conscious access to their 'sense ofrightness/wrongness' outputs. These are all eminently sensible qualifications, though one imagines that readers unconvinced by the coherence theory of inference in its cold version will not take much more of a shine to the hot version. It would have

Philosophy, 2007

This book is a piece of philosophical work of extremely high intellectual quality. Its purpose is to defend in detail a ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus. It succeeds in this aim. It thus accomplishes something that has not yet been accomplished even by Conant or Diamond. It is therefore a major contribution to ‘Wittgenstein studies’, to contemporary philosophy and to the philosophical history of recent philosophy. (It has significant implications, for instance, for the work of Freudians, Sartreans, Griceans, Davidsonians.)

Journal of the History of Ideas, 2002

In the Fall term of 1911, the 22-year old Ludwig Wittgenstein presented himself to the Cambridge philosopher of mathematics, Bertrand Russell, as a prospective student of philosophy.

2002

Soran Reader has been an outstanding Ph.D. supervisor. She deserves my sincere thanks for her hard work, her good judgement and her 'tough love'. I greatly value her friendship. All my teachers and colleagues at the University of Durham have helped me to develop as an undergraduate, postgraduate and as a teacher. I am grateful for feedback I received at the Department Research Seminar and from Andy Hamilton, who commented on a draft chapter. I also very much appreciate the feedback and guidance I received from Adrian Moore on numerous occasions. At Durham, I enjoyed the company of energetic and dedicated philosophy peers including Martin Connor, Stuart Hanscomb, Geraldine Coggins, James Clarke, Elaine Horner and many others who contributed to Eidos postgraduate seminars and the Wittgenstein reading group. I owe special thanks to Bill Pollard, for reminding me that what can be said at all can be said clearly; and to Simon James, for reminding me that what can be shown cannot be said.

I wrote this review a couple of years ago not knowing yet the excellent book "Wittgenstein's Notes on Logic" written by Michael Potter and devoted to the same issue roughly. If I had read it, my review of Morris' work would have been much more severe.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013

Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a monograph of less than 100 pages, has perhaps generated the highest ratio of commentary and controversy to text of any philosophical book of the past century. Wittgenstein recognized the difficulty his work would present to his readers. The only debts he cites in the Preface to the Tractatus are to "the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell," 2 yet Wittgenstein concluded that neither of these understood his book. 3 In a famous letter to Ludwig von Ficker, whom he was trying to persuade to publish the Tractatus, Wittgenstein admitted that "You won't-I really believe-get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it-the content of the book will be strange to you." But he added, "In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point of the book is an ethical one." 4 It is doubtful that Ficker found this last remark comforting, for it must have appeared completely mysterious to him how this book, which seems to consist almost entirely of a discussion of issues in philosophy of logic tied to the then still fairly obscure systems of symbolic logic of Frege and Russell, with only a few cryptic remarks about ethics in its closing pages, could have an ethical point. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein was completely serious in making this remark, and I hope to explain how a book with the title Logisch-1 Portions of this material were presented to the Philosophy Department at Georgetown University and discussed in a "Master Class" there on the Tractatus, and also at a Workshop on Wittgenstein and the Literary, the Ethical and the Unsayable at the University of Chicago. I am indebted to these conversations for several clarifications and improvements in this essay. 2 Quotations from the Tractatus are generally from the Ogden and Ramsey translation. Occasionally I will make silent emendations in the light of the Pears and McGuinness translation. Citations from the body of the Tractatus will be by numbered proposition.