Philosophy
Research: Projects
Wittgengenstein's Tractatus
A research project hosted by the Department of Philosophy
and sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Context
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus occupies a unique place in the history of analytical philosophy. As the acknowledged source of some of the key ideas of the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism, and thereby of the dominant approaches in analytic ontology and the philosophy of thought and language, the extent of its influence has never been in doubt. As embodying an intricate and intriguing system of the essential character of representation and thus of the world represented, it has, since its publication, commanded the attention of systematic commentators concerned to articulate the internal mechanics of the system and to extract from it theories of logic and of meaning to rival or else to complement contemporary views.
Over the past twenty years there has been an important shift away from that approach. The founding figures of analytical philosophy are no longer viewed as quasi-contemporaries contributing theoretical options to still current debates. Instead leading writers are now unanimous in holding that a proper appreciation of Frege, Russell or Wittgenstein depends on a historically sensitive account of their concerns and of the immediate context in which they worked. In the case of Wittgenstein’s early work, however, unanimity extends little further than that.
In this field two specially fruitful trends stand out. First, important work has been done to explain the logical details of the Tractatus – notably, for instance, its account of arithmetic, and its treatment of the paradoxes that arose in the logicist programme in foundations of mathematics – as involving responses to problems in his predecessors’ work. Secondly, perhaps the most influential recent work on the Tractatus has given prominence to Wittgenstein’s critical ‘metaphilosophy’: it locates the importance of the book in his repudiation of the positive explanatory and theoretical ambitions of philosophy, and thus insists that any interpretation must accord centrality to Wittgenstein’s seemingly-paradoxical condemnation of the majority of his own book as ‘nonsense’.
Each of these approaches has yielded important insights. However, the first’s detailed logical work has so far been only schematically connected with Wittgenstein’s critical conception of philosophy, while the second has yet to offer any compelling account of how that metaphilosophical attitude originates in Wittgenstein’s logical investigations.
The difference in emphasis between these two approaches, together with the relative neglect by each of the defining concern of the other, has made for unhelpful polemics between ‘new’ and ‘traditional’ interpretations. Such polemics are obviously unhelpful, since the features that each approach stresses are clearly both present in the book, and equally important to any mature understanding of it. The field urgently needs work to overcome this largely ill-founded polarization by providing a context for the integration of the concerns of both approaches.