Philosopical Apprentice.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jul 17, 2025

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Michael Beaney.
Oxford, 100 pp., £8.99, May 2023, 978 0 19 886137 9

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Alexander Booth.
Penguin, 94 pp., £14.99, December 2023, 978 0 241 68195 4

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Damion Searls.
Norton, 181 pp., £19.99, April, 978 1 324 09243 8

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n15/a.w.-moore/a-tove-on-the-table

My notes :

…

Part of the aim of the book is to indicate what it is about the world that makes it possible for us to represent it, in thought or in language. Wittgenstein is led to a vision of crystalline purity. The world is the totality of facts. Facts are determined by states of affairs. States of affairs, each of which is independent of every other, are configurations of objects. These objects would have existed however the facts had been. If the facts had been different, it would have been because the objects had been configured differently, not because there had been different objects. Representation itself consists of facts. Thus a thought or a statement is a fact, determined by a configuration of ‘signs’. In the most elementary case the signs stand for objects, and the fact that they are configured in the way they are represents that the corresponding objects are configured in the same way. The thought or statement in question thereby serves as a ‘picture’ of the corresponding fact. It is true if the objects are configured in that way, and it is false if they are not. In a less elementary case, for example in the case of a conjunction of two statements, truth or falsity is determined by the truth or falsity of its constituents: a conjunction of two statements is true if both its constituents are true, false otherwise.

…

The whole thing has the air of a metaphysical disquisition on the fundamental character of reality and our engagement with it. The culmination, however, consists of two remarkable propositions that cast doubt on this impression: the penultimate proposition, numbered 6.54, in which Wittgenstein says that anyone who understands him will eventually recognise what he has been saying as nonsensical (by ‘nonsensical’ he does not mean absurd or foolish, but quite literally lacking in meaning); and the final proposition, numbered 7, in which, as if in explanation of the propensity to produce such nonsense, he says that we must keep silent about what we cannot speak about.

…

The book’s point is an ethical one … [It] consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were … I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.

…

The book’s point is an ethical one … [It] consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were … I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.

…

P. A.