Wittgenstein: Early

Six dialogues inside the Tractatus — picturing the world in logic

A course on the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

What you will learn

  • Grasp the opening ontology: the world is the totality of FACTS, not of things — and a 'state of affairs' (*Sachverhalt*) is a combination of objects.
  • Understand the picture theory: a proposition is a model of reality whose elements are correlated with objects, sharing the logical form of what it depicts.
  • See why a proposition has *sense* whether true or false — it shows how things stand IF it is true, and can be compared with reality only because it pictures a definite possibility.
  • Understand why the Tractatus requires objects to be simple and to form the substance of the world.
  • Follow the argument from the determinacy of sense — and see why Wittgenstein never gives an example of a simple object.
  • Understand propositions as truth-functions of elementary propositions, and what the truth-table notation was built to show.
  • Grasp the fundamental thought — that the logical constants do not represent — and why it dissolves Frege's and Russell's logical objects.
  • Understand the saying/showing distinction: a proposition says that things stand thus; what it must share with reality to depict anything (logical form) it cannot say but only shows.

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…

Works read in this course

  • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — Wittgenstein's early masterwork in numbered propositions: the picture theory of meaning, the saying/showing distinction, the limits of language, and the closing silence — 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'.
  • Notebooks 1914-1916 — Wittgenstein's wartime notebooks recording the genesis of the Tractatus, including the origin of the picture theory.

Terms introduced

Sachverhalt, Satz, Sinn, sinnlos, das Mystische

Part of the Simposeum course library.