Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (i want to read a book .txt) 📕
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Ludwig Wittgenstein is considered by many to be one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He was born in Vienna to an incredibly rich family, but he gave away his inheritance and spent his life alternating between academia and various other roles, including serving as an officer during World War I and a hospital porter during World War II. When in academia Wittgenstein was taught by Bertrand Russell, and he himself taught at Cambridge.
He began laying the groundwork for Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while in the trenches, and published it after the end of the war. It has since come to be considered one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy. After publishing it, Wittgenstein concluded that it had solved all philosophical problems—so he never published another book-length work in his lifetime.
The book itself is divided into a series of short, self-evident statements, followed by sub-statements elucidating on their parent statement, sub-sub-statements, and so on. These statements explore the nature of philosophy, our understanding of the world around us, and how language fits in to it all. These views later came to be known as “Logical Atomism.”
This translation, while credited to C. K. Ogden, is actually mostly the work of F. P. Ramsey, one of Ogden’s students. Ramsey completed the translation when he was just 19 years of age. The translation was personally revised and approved by Wittgenstein himself, who, though he was Austrian, had spent much of his life in England.
Much of the Tractatus’ meaning is complex and difficult to unpack. It is still being interpreted and explored to this day.
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- Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein
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In the terminology of Hertz we might say: Only uniform connections are thinkable.
6.3611We cannot compare any process with the “passage of time”—there is no such thing—but only with another process (say, with the movement of the chronometer).
Hence the description of the temporal sequence of events is only possible if we support ourselves on another process.
It is exactly analogous for space. When, for example, we say that neither of two events (which mutually exclude one another) can occur, because there is no cause why the one should occur rather than the other, it is really a matter of our being unable to describe one of the two events unless there is some sort of asymmetry. And if there is such an asymmetry, we can regard this as the cause of the occurrence of the one and of the nonoccurrence of the other.
6.36111The Kantian problem of the right and left hand which cannot be made to cover one another already exists in the plane, and even in one-dimensional space; where the two congruent figures a and b cannot be made to cover one another without
moving them out of this space. The right and left hand are in fact completely congruent. And the fact that they cannot be made to cover one another has nothing to do with it.
A right-hand glove could be put on a left hand if it could be turned round in four-dimensional space.
6.362What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the law of causality cannot be described.
6.363The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.
6.3631This process, however, has no logical foundation but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen.
6.36311That the sun will rise tomorrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.
6.37A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.
6.371At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
6.372So people stop short at natural laws as something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they are both right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.
6.373The world is independent of my will.
6.374Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connection between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connection itself we could not again will.
6.375As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.
6.3751For two colours, e.g. to be at one place in the visual field, is impossible, logically impossible, for it is excluded by the logical structure of colour.
Let us consider how this contradiction presents itself in physics. Somewhat as follows: That a particle cannot at the same time have two velocities, i.e. that at the same time it cannot be in two places, i.e. that particles in different places at the same time cannot be identical.
It is clear that the logical product of two elementary propositions can neither be a tautology nor a contradiction. The assertion that a point in the visual field has two different colours at the same time, is a contradiction.
6.4All propositions are of equal value.
6.41The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
6.42Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher.
6.421It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
6.422The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form “thou shalt …” is: And what if I do not do it? But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself.
(And this is clear also that the reward must be something acceptable, and the punishment something unacceptable.)
6.423Of the will as the subject of the ethical we cannot speak.
And the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.
6.43If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.
6.431As in death, too, the world does not change, but ceases.
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