Silliman's Papers

Short Summary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is contributing to a system of philosophical atomism, continuing and yet also deviating from Russell’s project of articulating the conditions of a logically perfect language. It was intended to fix the confusions of Frege’s Begriffsschrift and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and thereby to solve the problems of philosophy. The binding theme of the work is the theme of limits, covering the limits of the world, thought, the expression of thought, and logic/language.

The Tractatus can be outlined in three parts:

1. Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language, whereby the world is made up of atomic facts and pictured by propositions, propositions represent facts by bearing an identical logical structure to them, and the structures common to the picture of the world and the world are shown and not said.

2. Wittgenstein’s exploration of the logical structure of language (which is also the logical structure of the world), covering truth tables, notation, Russell’s paradox, paradoxes, contradictions, etc., concluding with the postulation of the essential logical form of all propositions.

3. Wittgenstein’s considerations of the other side of the limits of the world and logic, the “mystical” – i.e., the will, ethics, aesthetics, God, etc. – which cannot be examined within language.