The Method of the Tractatus

A few years ago, a group of American philosophers, Cora\ud Diamond and James Conant among them, suggested a\ud resolute, or radical reading of Wittgenstein"s Tractatus.\ud These two authors claim that the Tractatus has a body,\ud and a frame. Wittgenstein minded the frame seriously,\ud whereas all the remaining propositions of the Tractatus,\ud which belong to its body, are written tongue in cheek. To\ud the frame of the work belong the Preface, §§3.32–3.326,\ud 4–4.003, 4.111–4.112 and 6.53–6.54. In it Wittgenstein\ud gave meta-theoretical instructions how to treat the rest of\ud the book. The main idea of the frame is expressed in §\ud 6.54 which reads: "My propositions serve as elucidations in\ud the following way: anyone who understands me eventually\ud recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them\ud – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to\ud speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.).�\ud This was the real message of the Tractatus

The Composition of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus": An Interpretative Study

When Wittgenstein started writing the Tractatus in June 1915, he was convinced that he was producing a theory. Accordingly, he chose a theoretical style of expressing his thought. Wittgenstein abandoned this stance only at the end of his work of composing the book. He realized that what he is producing in not a theory but a manual for improving our language and thinking. Unfortunately, it was too late to change the architecture and the style of the book: Wittgenstein simply had no time to do that. This drawback makes the Tractatus notoriously difficult to understand and is apparently the major factor that caused the so called “Tractarian Wars”

The Earlier Wittgenstein on the Notion of Religious Attitude

I defend a new interpretation of Wittgenstein's notion of religious (or ethical) attitude in the Tractatus, one that rejects three key views from the secondary literature: firstly, the view that, for Wittgenstein, the willing subject is a transcendental condition for the religious attitude; secondly, the view that the religious attitude is an emotive response to the world or something closely modelled on this notion of emotive response; and thirdly, the view that, although the religious and ethical pseudo-propositions of the Tractatus are nonsensical, they nevertheless succeed in expressing the religious attitude endorsed by Wittgenstein. In connection to the first, I argue that the notion of willing subject as transcendental condition is abandoned by Wittgenstein in the Notebooks and is no longer a feature of his position in the Tractatus. In connection to the second, I argue that the religious attitude is dispositional rather than emotive for Wittgenstein: it is a disposition to use signs in a way that demonstrates one's conceptual clarity. Finally, in connection to the third, I argue that the religious or ethical attitude is strongly ineffable in that it cannot be described, expressed or conveyed by language at all.Peer reviewe

the primacy of use over naming

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein proposed the notion of meaning that accounts for the large variety of contexts in which we apply the term “meaning”. This paper agreement with the manner in which Wittgenstein enhance his conception of meaning emphasizing his methodology of observation and description of particular cases. By applying a descriptive approach, Wittgenstein demonstrated that meaning of the term does not reside in physical or mental objects as well as in its correlations. As a result of contrasting denotative theory as well as the correspondence theory of meaning and recognizing the inadequacy of the accounts of meaning, he has proposed earlier in his Tractatus. But in later work, he has suggested that only one conception of meaning which could not be invalidated, at least for a large class of cases. This is none other than the notion of meaning which is regarded as public in nature. Consequently, the meaning of a term is not its denotation but its “use” in the language. Hence, by upholding the slogan i.e., “meaning is use” here I want to illustrate the supremacy of use over “naming” concerning to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations