Wittgenstein: Early

Three dialogues inside the Tractatus — picturing the world in logic

A course on the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Course outline

1. The Picture Theory — The central idea of the whole book: the world is the totality of facts, and a proposition is a PICTURE of a fact — its elements standing for objects, their arrangement showing how things would stand…
2. The Substance of the World — A picture works by standing in for objects — so the objects had better be there, and had better be simple. The strangest argument in the book: why sense itself requires an unshakeable floor beneath…
3. Truth-Functions and the General Form — Wittgenstein invented the truth-table to make a point, not to save time: that logic adds nothing to the world. Every proposition is built from elementary ones by a single operation, and the 'logical…
4. Saying and Showing — The distinction on which the whole book turns: a proposition can SAY how things stand, but the logical form it shares with reality it can only SHOW — and so the propositions of logic say nothing, and…
5. The Limits of My World — The most disquieting stretch of the book: the limit of language is not a wall out there but a limit of MY world, the self that owns it is nowhere inside it, and solipsism carried out strictly turns…
6. The Mystical and the Ladder — The book's true, ethical point, lying in what it does NOT say: the meaning of life, value, the self, and God fall outside the limit of language and can only show themselves — and the Tractatus's own…

Part of the Simposeum course library.