A Study in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Alexander Maslow

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520376779
• eBook ISBN: 9780520376809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

A Study in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, by Alexander Maslow is a rigorous, historically situated guide to one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic philosophical texts. Writing with candor about the Tractatus’s “terse, cryptic, aphoristic” style, Maslow offers a lucid reconstruction of its core claims while acknowledging the interpretive perils the book poses even to specialists. Drawing on first-hand interlocutors and early readers—Bertrand Russell, F. P. Ramsey, and Moritz Schlick—he situates Wittgenstein at the tense intersection of logical positivism and metaphysical longing, tracing how the clear voices of Frege and Russell intermingle with the muffled echoes of Kant, Schopenhauer, Plato, and Augustine. Maslow’s central wager is both bold and clarifying: read the Tractatus as an inquiry into the formal preconditions of language—and thus of world-constitution—yielding a picture that approaches a Kantian phenomenalism with “language” playing the role of transcendental form.

The book’s architecture mirrors its thesis. Early chapters develop the grammar of objects and atomic facts, and the distinction between sign and symbol; the technical middle chapter treats molecular propositions as truth-functions, logic, and the Principia, while the culminating chapter turns to method—philosophy as clarification—before engaging Wittgenstein’s notorious gestures toward solipsism and the mystical. Maslow neither domesticates nor sensationalizes these moments; he shows how they complete the Tractatus’s demand that “what can be said” be said clearly—and that what cannot be said nevertheless “shows itself.” The result is a compelling, self-aware companion for advanced students and scholars seeking a disciplined, historically informed path through the Tractatus’s obscurities without losing sight of its intellectual daring.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 1
• Objects, Atomic Facts, and Language
• Symbol and Sign
• Truth Functions of Atomic Propositions
• Wittgenstein’s Philosophy