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Written in the trenches of the First World War and finished in a prisoner-of-war camp, the Tractatus is made out of seven numbered propositions that Wittgenstein believed solved every problem philosophy had ever had.
His argument starts from a simple claim: the world is not made of things, but of facts — everything that is the case. A proposition is a picture of a fact, and it works the way an actual photograph works: right if its structure matches what happened, wrong if it doesn't, with nothing else needed to settle which.
A proposition can only say what could be pictured that way. Ethics, the meaning of a life, God — none of it can be pictured as a fact, so none of it can actually be said. He says more: these aren't even real questions, just language mistaking itself for sense.
Wittgenstein doesn't call this a loss. He thought silence protected what mattered most — though within a decade, the Vienna Circle would read that same silence as permission to discard it, and build logical positivism from a book that meant the opposite. He said what he meant to say anyway: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Wittgenstein and the Tractatus: A Logos Reader original covering Wittgenstein's life and intellectual formation, the architecture of the book's seven propositions, the picture theory, the break with Frege and Russell, what lies beyond the sayable, and the reversal of the Investigations.
Critical Notices of the Tractatus, by F. P. Ramsey: Published in Mind, October 1923. Ramsey was twenty when he wrote it, and had already helped prepare the English translation himself — he would die at twenty-six. He credits the book's account of logical propositions and the picture theory, and presses on the points where the argument leans on form, internal relation, and what can only be shown.
The Turning Point in Philosophy, by Moritz Schlick: Originally "Die Wende der Philosophie," Erkenntnis 1 (1930/31), translated for this edition. Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle, sets out the program that received Wittgenstein's book: philosophy as an activity of clarification rather than a body of doctrine, and traditional metaphysics as an attempt to say what can only be shown.
Logical Positivism: A New Movement in European Philosophy, by Albert E. Blumberg and Herbert Feigl. The Journal of Philosophy, May 1931. The article that introduced the term "logical positivism" to English-speaking readers.
The Logos Philosophy Club publishes major philosophical works, carefully edited and presented in bilingual editions designed for serious study.
