Wittgenstein: Early

Three dialogues inside the Tractatus — picturing the world in logic

A course on the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Course outline

1. The Picture Theory — The central idea of the whole book: the world is the totality of facts, and a proposition is a PICTURE of a fact — its elements standing for objects, their arrangement showing how things would stand…
2. Saying and Showing — The distinction on which the whole book turns: a proposition can SAY how things stand, but the logical form it shares with reality it can only SHOW — and so the propositions of logic say nothing, and…
3. The Mystical and the Ladder — The book's true, ethical point, lying in what it does NOT say: the meaning of life, value, the self, and God fall outside the limit of language and can only show themselves — and the Tractatus's own…

Part of the Symposium course library.