Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Well, one

philosopher who has influenced me a lot and who is known to the current philosophical world only for one line in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in which he says, I think this brackets, but not in Mautner's sense.

That's Fritz Mautner, who is an enormously popular, widely read philosopher in Habsburg and post-Habsburg Vienna.

And he was a radical nominalist.

It's, oh yeah, I really like Wittgenstein.

But of course, you never knew if they liked Wittgenstein of the logical positivist Wittgenstein of the Tractatus or if they meant the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations which is actually two different worlds and in fact in England it's very often it's the logical positivist Tractatus Wittgenstein in this country it's usually the Philosophical Investigations I thought the same thing is true about Girard but it's actually there almost in reverse.

And Anthony Bartlett is spelling this out, at least in a way.

You know, I've seen this elsewhere, but he spells this out in some detail, contrasting the initial discovery of Girard, you know, this kind of world-changing moment in which he comes to an anti-sacrificial, an apocalyptic, and of course the word apocalyptic even is going to change here.

I think Wittgenstein also thought, in fact, he said to somebody in a letter to someone who was a priest, I think, I'm blanking on the name, but our listeners, some of them will know who I'm talking about.

He said, after he wrote the Tractatus, that it has two parts.

One is the part that I wrote, and the other is the part that I didn't.

And he said, and the part that I didn't write is the important part.

I think the later Wittgenstein would probably agree with that entirely.

And I think Wittgenstein ought to have said something like that.

So what I, I guess my own view about the early Wittgenstein, and this is Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein for our philosophy students out there.

is that what he's really saying is that there's a particular kind of use of language, which is, I'll call it scientific fact-stating language.

Wittgenstein took himself to have solved the problems of philosophy, gave away his inherited fortune, and left to teach primary school in the Austrian mountains.

The Tractatus became the manifesto of a group of philosophers in Vienna, including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath, who called their position logical positivism.

A statement is meaningful only if there is some way of settling whether it is true.

Analytic statements are settled by unfolding the definitions of the words involved.

Gödel had shown it wasn't as simple as that.

Carnap struggled for years to absorb the result.

Wittgenstein dismissed it, but was already repudiating the Tractatus himself, meaning he came to argue, lay not in matching picture to reality, but simply in how people discourse in public.

The one-time prophet of the Circle left nothing of its philosophy standing.

Descartes was a bit not very easy to decipher and to put it in, in, in a systematic way.

So I went to, uh, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and I went through the whole book and then showed that, so what is the problem there? Perhaps I should say something.

So the, the book s- uh, sounds like ...

Not sound.