Philosophy
Research: Projects
Wittgenstein's Tractatus
A research project hosted by the Department of Philosophy
and sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Research Aims
- To enhance our understanding of how broad aspects of the conception of philosophy advocated in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus have their origins and motivations in its detailed engagement with the logical and semantic theories of his predecessors, and thereby to promote a more integrated appreciation of Wittgenstein’s early work, of its position in the history of the analytical tradition, and of its continuing importance.
- To clarify the logical and semantic doctrines of his predecessors that set the framework for the investigations that culminated in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
- To identify the causes of his dissatisfaction with those doctrines, and to reconstruct the history of his criticisms of them.
- To present central features of the internal theorizing of the Tractatus, such as its understanding of the generality and necessity of logic, and its account of the sense of a proposition, as grounded in those criticisms.
- To explore how Wittgenstein’s conception of the essentially diagnostic and corrective role of philosophy likewise originates in his critical reaction to his predecessors’ work. His clear metaphilosophical contention was that his own seeming-theorizing could overcome the problems identified in his predecessors’ work only if it was conceived as demonstrating the emptiness of the metaphysical questions they sought to address, rather than as advocating alternative positive answers to them: it will be crucial to explicate this contention in conjunction with the detail of his criticisms.