Lugwig Wittgenstein
An Austrian-British Philosopher born 26 April 1889 and died 29 April 1951 aged 62 was considered by some of the greatest philosophers of the 20th to play a huge role in 20th century analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein’s work focused mainly in logic, the philosophy of mathematic, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. During his time as a professor in philosophy at Cambridge University, Wittgenstein published one book review, one article, a children’s dictionary and the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Wittgenstein’s work on logic began in 1913; shortly after his father died after receiving inheritance Wittgenstein became one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He retreated to a small village in Norway for the winter where he began writing his notes on logic. Wittgenstein was visited in 1914 by Moore an internationally known philosopher, Wittgenstein regarded Moore as an example of how far someone could get in life with “absolutely no intelligence”. Moore acted as Wittgenstein’s secretary over the next few months, recording everything Wittgenstein said. On his return to Cambridge University, Moore asked the University to consider accepting Logik as a degree of its own but the case was refused, Wittgenstein was furious and wrote a letter to Moore in May later that year: "If I am not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to Hell directly; and if I am worth it and you don't do it then—by God—you might go there." The two then didn’t speak again until 1929.
With the start of World War I, Wittgenstein was posted on the Russian Line front in March 1916, giving his time on the Tractatus a break. Throughout the war, it has been said that Wittgenstein kept notebooks filled with philosophical reflections, alongside personal remarks about the concept of the character of other soldiers. In the summer of 1918, Wittgenstein took military leave and completed the Tractatus in late August and submitted it to The Proposition for publishing. However a series of events later followed delaying the publishing process, Wittgenstein’s uncle died, followed by his brother committing suicide, the third of his brothers to commit suicide at the time, then his dear friend was killed in a plane crash. Following this Wittgenstein was sent back to the war on the Italian front where he was captured and held in an Italian prisoner camp for 9 months. After returning to his family in Vienna, in 1919; Wittgenstein talked constantly about suicide, his family claimed he was very ill.
The Tractatus was eventually published in 1921 as part of Oswald’s journal (Annalen der Naturphilosophie); although, Wittgenstein was not happy about this in the least and claimed it to be a pirate edition. Russell agreed to write an introduction into the journal as to why it was important, because otherwise it would have been unlikely to have been published as Wittgenstein wasn’t well known in Philosophy at the time. Wittgenstein didn’t appreciate Russell’s help and felt he has misunderstood the Tractatus as a whole.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Tractatus consisted of 7 chapters; all consisting of one sentence each. The book is seen to address the central problems in philosophy which focus on the world, thought and language and as Wittgenstein terms it; presents a solution to these problems, which are grounded in logic and in the nature of representation.
1.The world is everything that is the case. * - Wittgenstein sees the world as consisting of facts, rather than the atomistic conception that the world is made up of objects…In addition:
2.What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. – States of affairs are just combinations of objects, according to logic objects combine with one another based on their logical and internal properties. These states of affairs are based on the idea of actual and possible, they are based on the things that make up the whole of reality, they are the states of affairs which do actually exist.
3.The logical picture of the facts is the thought. – This focuses of Wittgenstein’s most famous idea that thoughts and propositions are pictures and “the picture is a model of reality”. Pictures are made up of elements which together create a picture, each element being an object and the combination of objects represent a state of affairs.
4. The thought is the significant proposition. – continuing his investigation into the possibilities of significance for propositions; Wittgenstein claimed that “Only the proposition has sense; only in the context of a proposition has a name meaning”, he presents two conditions for sensical language; first the structure of the propositions must conform to the constraints of logical form and the elements of the proposition must have reference. Concluding that it is logic itself which gives us the structure and limits of what can be said, as it is based on the idea that every proposition is either true or false.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) – Wittgenstein presents the first presentation of Frege’s logic in the form of ‘truth-tables’. These tables allow the means to go back and analyse propositions breaking them down into their atomic parts. Wittgenstein claims; “every statement about complexes can be analyzed into a statement about their constituent parts and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes”.
6. 6. The general form of truth-function is: [....]. This is the general form of proposition. This is evidence for Wittgenstein’s claim that any proposition “is the result of successive applications” which means he is able to show that all meaningful propositions are of equal value.
7. 7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. – the final sentence concerns the idea or what can (or cannot) and what should (or should not) be said.
Wittgenstein claims “The book will … draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts …. The limit can … only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense” which is created on the logical construction of finding the limits of the world, thought and language based on distinguishing between sense and nonsense; Basic Logic.
