Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge Classics) (Paperback)

by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Author), Bertrand Russell (Introduction) "Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it -or at least similar..." (more)
Key Phrases: general propositional form, propositional sign, elementary propositions (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Tractatus is one of the fundamental texts of twentieth-century philosophy - short, bold, cryptic, and remarkable in its power to stir the imagination of philosophers and non-philosophers alike.
–Michael Frayn

Wittgenstein, in his preface, tells us that his book is not a textbook, and that its object will be attained if there is one person who reads it with understanding and to whom it affords pleasure. We think there are many persons who will read it with understanding and enjoy it. The treatise is clear and lucid. The author is continually arresting us with new and striking thoughts, and he closes on a note of mystical exaltation.
–The Times Literary Supplement

Product Description
Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme brilliance, it captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 2 edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415254086
• ISBN-13: 978-0415254083
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #19,227 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #13 in	Books > Nonfiction > Philosophy > Logic & Language
  #18 in	Books > Nonfiction > Philosophy > Modern
  #60 in	Books > History > Europe > Germany

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

136 of 144 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dissolving Philosophy By Logical Atomism, December 15, 2005

By	S. Guha (Redmond, Washington United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Since most of the reviews of the Tractatus here contain either fawning praise or vituperation without much expository content, it may perhaps be useful to give an account, in reasonably clear terms, of what this book is actually about. Granted that my account is somewhat simplified, it will still be better than quasi-mystical gushing praise or bitter unargued criticism. The central idea of the Tractatus is expressed very clearly at proposition 4.01 and certain comments following it:

"A proposition is a picture of reality.
A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it." [4.01]

"At first sight a proposition--one set out on the printed page, for example--does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture of a piece of music . . . And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent." [4.011]

"A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world.
They are all construed according to a common logical pattern." [4.014]

So, Wittgenstein's basic view in the Tractatus is simple: statements ("propositions") are pictures or models of the situations they are about. The sequence of words "The cat is on the mat" would be taken by him to picture the situation that consists in one object (the cat) standing in a certain relation (being on) to another object (the mat). Or rather, this would be the way to understand this proposition if the cat and mat themselves were indivisible atoms, without any smaller parts. Since, actually, the cat is made up of a great many smaller parts, as is the mat, the full analysis of "The cat is on the mat" would be much more complicated. But basically, a proposition is a picture of the situation it describes just as the notes on a sheet of music depict a melody, and just as the written letters "pop" depict a certain sound. In breaking down the cat and the mat, we must eventually come to a point where things can't be broken down any further, with objects that are the basic constituents of reality. The relationships between these basic objects, which Wittgenstein just calls "objects", but which others have called "logical atoms", constitute the most elementary situations. These situations are described by what he calls "elementary propositions". Given a bunch of elementary propositions, we can combine and re-combine them by certain basic operations, called truth-functional operations, which are explained in any textbook of elementary formal logic. Two such operations are conjunction and negation. So, given three atoms, a, b, and c, and a relation R (R might be the relation "being on", as with the cat and the mat), we have, as elementary propositions, for instance:

aRb ("a is on b")
bRc ("b is on c")
aRc ("a is on c")

Then we can make new, compound propositions like

(aRb & bRc)
~aRc
(aRb & bRc) & ~aRc

Where "&" just means "and", as in "The cat is on the mat and the cherry is on the tree", and "~" means "It is not the case that", as in "It is not the case that the cat is on the mat". So the first of the above three compounds means "a is on b and b is on c", and the second means "It is not the case that a is on c", that is, a is not on c. You can easily work out the third one for yourself.

By means of operations like this (actually, Wittgenstein uses a different, but equivalent operation), one can build up an enormous stock of compound propositions. In fact, according to Wittgenstein, anything that can be said at all can be said by taking elementary propositions and applying operations like this repeatedly (albeit you might have to apply such operations infinitely, or to an infinite collection of propositions). Basically, then, given the simplest pictures of the world, we can stitch them together into more and more complicated pictures, and these yield all the statements and thoughts we can make, or at least all the ones that make any sense. Every meaningful statement ultimately breaks down to elementary propositions, propositions entirely in terms of simple signs or names (like "a" and "b") that stand for logical atoms. Everything that can be said meaningfully can, in principle, be broken down like this. This is the basic idea of logical atomism. Most of the technical work in this book consists of machinery for reducing all propositions of science and mathematics to combinations of elementary propositions. In the process, Wittgenstein shows you, he thinks, how to reduce claims with notions like "all" and "some" (like "All whales are mammals", "Some lawyers are crooks") and numerical claims ("There are four books on the shelf") to combinations of elementary propositions. If Wittgenstein succeeds in this, he considers himself to have shown that his "picture theory" of language is correct.

Okay, now you want to know, what's the *philosophical* point of all this? Well, for one thing, it means that anything you *can't* picture cannot be expressed by a meaningful proposition. If you try to speak of things that can't be pictured in Wittgenstein's way, you end up talking nonsense, in that what you are saying won't be true or false. Such utterances may express how you feel, or they may serve some other function (besides saying something) but they won't *say* anything that can be true (or false), and so there won't be any point in *arguing* about it. And what "things" are these, that you can't meaningfully talk about? The short answer is, all of traditional philosophy. Take ethics, for instance: "things" like right and wrong, or good and bad, can't be pictured, and so ethical "propositions" like "Murder is wrong" don't say anything. Maybe they express your feelings, or reflect some psychological fact, but they are not true or false. Likewise for religious claims that defy picturing, like "God is love" or "Brahman manifests itself in all things". Likewise for metaphysical claims about God or substance or causation or any underlying non-empirical reality. Likewise for epistemological worries about justification or rationality; these cannot be pictured in the requisite way either (hence Wittgenstein dismisses skepticism as nonsense). Wittgenstein's views of language are *so* restrictive that most of what philosophers have wanted to talk about turn out to fall into the category of the unspeakable, what he calls "the mystical". The mystical is what cannot be pictured, what is therefore beyond the realm of logic, reasoning, and articulate speech. About it, Wittgenstein claims, we cannot speak, and therefore we should be silent.

Oddly enough, Wittgenstein's own book turns out to be an attempt to talk about the mystical. For one of the things that cannot be pictured, is the very fact, as Wittgenstein takes it to be, that propositions are pictures of reality. (Think about it: how can you make a picture that says that propositions are pictures of reality? There's no way to do it along the lines of "The cat is on the mat", is there?) In fact, every attempt to talk about the relation between language and reality is itself an attempt to speak of the unspeakable, to attempt to characterize what can't be pictured. Wittgenstein recognizes this and responds thus:

"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright." [6.54]

Wittgenstein's Tractatus itself, then, is a violation of his commandment to be silent in the face of the mystical. And once it is *recognized* as a violation, Wittgenstein hopes you will throw the book away and return to the ordinary, empirical world, free of any further desire to do philosophy, having gotten a clear vision of language and the world that makes it obvious to you that philosophy is a mistaken attempt to speak of the unspeakable. (You can now see why this book provokes bitter hostility in those who cherish traditional philosophy--after all, it says they're wasting their time!) But if so, how can Wittgenstein himself be right in writing the book? Isn't *it* a mistaken attempt to speak about the unspeakable? Yes and no. Yes, it *is* an attempt to say what can't be said--hence, once you understand it, paradoxically, you see that it's nonsense! But it is not a *mistaken* attempt, rather it is a self-conscious attempt, made necessary by our confusion and unclarity about the world while we are still enmeshed in the tangles of traditional philosophy. While that nonsense imprisons us, we cannot recognize it *as* nonsense, and as such, like mentally deranged people, we have to be approached *with* nonsense if we are to be cured--nonsense is all we respond to. So this book is a kind of curative "nonsense", like a purgative for the soul; it is meant to cleanse the mind of philosophical confusion (that is, of philosophy itself) and, at the end, to remove itself as the final piece of "confusion". To use a computer metaphor, the Tractatus is a program that wipes your whole philosophical "hard drive", and erases itself as its final operation. And after that final erasure, we return to the ordinary world, free of philosophy, in the deafening silence that is our acknowledgement of "das Mystiche"--the mystical in, and above, the ordinary.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic with contemporary relevance, May 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Translated by C.K. Ogden with Facing German Text (International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, & Scientific Method) (Paperback)

Wittgenstein's first published work. Should be as famous for Russell's misunderstanding of it, made obvious in his introduction, as for it's effect on the positivists and modern philosophical logic. Absolutely essential reading for studying Wittgenstein's later work. The Investigations can be read as a refutation of the Tractatus, and thereby, as a refutation of much of contemporary philosophy of language. While Wittgenstein doesn't help his readers with either references or explanatory preamble, the effort of reading this book will be well rewarded to anybody studying contemporary issues in philosophical logic, philosophy of language or philosophy of science. Whatismore, Wittgenstein's poetic style is a joy to read and many of his aphorisms will come back to you in other studies.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Semi-Successful in its Domain; NOT for the Faint of Heart, August 22, 2004

By	M. Manson (Boston, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: German and English (International Library of Philosophy) (Hardcover)

Tracatus is the only book Wittgenstein published during his life. He was an odd man, with an odd lifestyle, and he published it with the idea that it would be the "book to end all books" philosophically.

Ironically, in his later years he denounced the book and called himself naive for writing it.

On the below review: Tractatus focuses on an empirical ontology. Where the review below goes wrong is the assumption that Wittgenstein is denouncing all non-objective and materialistic reality. The final line in the book (which is probably the books most poignant, and oft-quoted line) is "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." demonstrates Wittgenstein is aware of the context that he's covering: the empirical, and objective realm of sensorimotor and rational experience. Wittgenstein was quite the mystic (to the horrors of Bertrand Russell), so one cannot be polemic towards his implied intentions; Wittgenstein was simply attempting to comprehensively cover the only realm in which he felt was capable of being written about: the objective realm.

It is under this context the book must be appropriately reviewed. The following paragraph will review the book within those parameters.

The book is quite thorough. It is a mere 90 pages or so, but every statement is concise, to-the-point, and unwavering in its objective quantification and observation of reality. It is laid out like an old mathematical textbook with decimal numbers annotating each statement in relation to every other statement. Thorough it is, but the book also requires a great deal of effort. Wittgenstein assigns a seemingly endless list of nouns to vague and ambiguous ideas (i.e., fact, thought, picture, proposition, internal property, composite name, sign, etc.) This may be a problem you just have to read the book to understand. When he states something like: "An elementary proposition consists of a nexus of names," where he's previously assigned arbitrary values to "proposition," "nexus," and "name,"--which have been defined by even MORE arbitrary terms--things get very garbled and inconceivable about 1/3 of the way through. It's almost too concise and blunt for its own good, as Wittgenstein offers NO examples, contexts, pretenses, or elaborations... at all!

The book accomplishes what it sets out to do, albeit in an inefficient manner. But honestly, I found the 600-page "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," by Locke to take less effort and to be more comprehensive and effective than the 90-page Tractatus.

Some people swear by this book though, and I suppose it comes down to what kind of thinker you are. If you are a very logical thinker that is willing to sit down and digest every sentence for 5 minutes, then you might get something out of this book. This NOT a book that is meant to have a page turned more than every 10 minutes.