Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (i want to read a book .txt) ๐
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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 problemsโso 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 โLogical Atomism.โ
This translation, while credited to C. K. Ogden, is actually mostly the work of F. P. Ramsey, one of Ogdenโs 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 Tractatusโ 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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I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts.
If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. The more the nail has been hit on the head.โ โHere I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible. Simply because my powers are insufficient to cope with the task.โ โMay others come and do it better.
On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.
L. W.
Vienna, 1918
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 11The world is everything that is the case.
1.1The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
1.12For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
1.13The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2The world divides into facts.
1.21Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.
2What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
2.01An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).
2.011It is essential to a thing that it can be a constituent part of an atomic fact.
2.012In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing.
2.0121It would, so to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist alone on its own account, subsequently a state of affairs could be made to fit.
If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them.
(A logical entity cannot be merely possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.)
Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things.
If I can think of an object in the context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context.
2.0122The thing is independent, in so far as it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of independence is a form of connection with the atomic fact, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to occur in two different ways, alone and in the proposition.)
2.0123If I know an object, then I also know all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts.
(Every such possibility must lie in the nature of the object.)
A new possibility cannot subsequently be found.
2.01231In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.
2.0124If all objects are given, then thereby are all possible atomic facts also given.
2.013Every thing is, as it were, in a space of possible atomic facts. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space.
2.0131A spatial object must lie in infinite space. (A point in space is an argument place.)
A speck in a visual field need not be red, but it must have a colour; it has, so to speak, a colour space round it. A tone must have a pitch, the object of the sense of touch a hardness, etc.
2.014Objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs.
2.0141The possibility of its occurrence in atomic facts is the form of the object.
2.02The object is simple.
2.0201Every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes.
2.021Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound.
2.0211If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.
2.0212It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).
2.022It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have somethingโ โa formโ โin common with the real world.
2.023This fixed form consists of the objects.
2.0231The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the propositionsโ โfirst formed by the configuration of the objects.
2.0232Roughly speaking: objects are colourless.
2.0233Two objects of the same logical form areโ โapart from their external propertiesโ โonly differentiated from one another in that they are different.
2.02331Either a thing has properties which no other has, and then one can distinguish it straight away from the others by a description and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things which have the totality of their properties in common, and then it is quite impossible to point to any one of them.
For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish itโ โfor otherwise it would be distinguished.
2.024Substance is what exists independently of what is
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