Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

What in the Tractatus is Wittgenstein Talking About? Early Wittgenstein seems to suggest that sentences of natural science have meaning, without being able to give meaning to the way of which we understand those sentences. This dismisses philosophy as only a tool to help clarify claims of natural science. However, he uses philosophy to come to this realization. He makes the realization that the way he explains his own findings are in fact a violation of those findings stating, “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless” (M&S 128). However, his original findings are so obscure that it is difficult to follow his propositions long enough to understand him. In this essay, I am attempting…

“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. This is the enigmatic sentence that ends Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: a work written by a 29-year old philosopher-imprisoned in an Italian POW camp amidst the final months of World War I. A work with which he claimed to have solved all the philosophical problems that had puzzled philosophers for millennia. All within 100 pages of painstakingly enumerated “propositions” that composed the Tractatus. A work with…

The most extraordinary things are also the everyday. —Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life This presentation takes as its starting point Marjorie Perloff’s assertion, in the context of a discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, that poetry is not “the expression or externalization of inner feeling; it is, more accurately, the critique of that expression.” (Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 1996: 184) As such, poetry provides a vital occasion to examine, and reexamine, the language of our everyday life. By…

Sarah Freihon Professor Hsu Philosophy 117 19 December 2014 Part B: In the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein commits himself to the view that everything that can be said or thought is a truth function of elementary propositions. I will begin, with a brief explanation of Wittgenstein’s argument that there are in a certain sense no negative facts, no disjunctive facts, and no conjunctive facts. Then, I will examine Wittgenstein’s claim that the truth or falsity of a general…