Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134644650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the greatest and most fascinating philosophers of all time. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, composed in a series of remarkable numbered propositions, was the only book he published in his lifetime. He tackles nothing less than the question of whether there is such a thing as a logically perfect language and, armed with it, what we can say about the nature of the world itself. Pushing the limits of language, logic and philosophy, the Tractatus is a brilliant, cryptic and hypnotic tour de force, exerting a major impact on twentieth-century philosophy and stirring the imagination today.

With a new foreword by Ray Monk.

...

1^*	The world is all that is the case.
1.1	The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11	The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12	For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13	The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2	The world divides into facts.
1.21	Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.
2	What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.
2.01	A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).
2.011	It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs.
2.012	In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.
2.0121	It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own.
	If things can occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning.
	(Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts.)
	Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others.
	If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations.
2.0122	Things are independent in so far as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with states of affairs, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to appear in two different rôles: by themselves, and in propositions.)
2.0123	If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs.
	(Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.)
	A new possibility cannot be discovered later.
2.01231	If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties.
2.0124	If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given.
2.013	Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space.
2.0131	A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.)
	A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on.
2.014	Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
2.0141	The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object.
2.02	Objects are simple.
2.0201	Every statement about complexes can be resolved into a statement about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the complexes completely.
2.021	Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite.
2.0211	If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.
2.0212	In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world (true or false).
2.022	It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something—a form—in common with it.
2.023	Objects are just what constitute this unalterable form.
2.0231	The substance of the world can only determine a form, and not any material properties. For it is only by means of propositions that material properties are represented—only by the configuration of objects that they are produced.
2.0232	In a manner of speaking, objects are colourless.
2.0233	If two objects have the same logical form, the only distinction between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are different.
2.02331	Either a thing has properties that nothing else has, in which case we can immediately use a description to distinguish it from the others and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things that have the whole set of their properties in common, in which case it is quite impossible to indicate one of them.
	For if there is nothing to distinguish a thing, I cannot distinguish it, since otherwise it would be distinguished after all.
2.024	Substance is what subsists independently of what is the case.
2.025	It is form and content.
2.0251	Space, time, and colour (being coloured) are forms of objects.