Wittgenstein Ludwig - Essays on Wittgensteins Tractatus

ESSAYS ON WITTGENSTEINS

TRACTATUS

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS

WITTGENSTEIN

ESSAYS ON WITTGENSTEINS

TRACTATUS

Edited by

Irving M. Copi and Robert W. Beard

First published in 1966

This edition first published 2006

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

1966 Irving M. Copi and Robert W. Beard

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Essays on Wittgensteins Tractatus

ISBN 0-415-38279-3 (volume)

ISBN 0-415-38278-5 (set)

Routledge Library Editions: Wittgenstein

ESSAYS ON WITTGENSTEINS

TRACTATUS

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

circa 1908

By kind permission of Mr. W. Mays

ESSAYS ON Wittgensteins

Tractatus

Edited by

IRVING M. COPI

University of Michigan

and

ROBERT W. BEARD

Florida State University

First published in 1966

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park,

Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN

Irving M. Copi and Robert W. Beard

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

Contents

Gilbert Ryle

Frank P. Ramsey

Theodore de Laguna

Ludwig Wittgenstein

John Wisdom

Julian Bell

Julius R. Weinberg

Willis Moore

Max Black

Edna OShaughnessy

Ellis Evans

B. F. McGuinness

Jaakko Hintikka

Irving M. Copi

Irving M. Copi

G. E. M. Anscombe

Edwin B. Allaire

Ellis Evans

George L. Proctor

Judith Jarvis Thomson

Richard J. Bernstein

Wilfrid Sellars

H. R. G. Schwyzer

David Keyt

D. S. Shwayder

Erik Stenius

Edwin B. Allaire

Gustav Bergmann

Eddy Zemach

David Keyt

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEINS Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published over forty years ago, yet interest in it seems to be increasing rather than diminishing with passage of time. This is remarkable in view of the enormous impact it has already had on philosophical thought during the first half of the century.

The Tractatus profoundly influenced several major contemporary philosophical movements. Bertrand Russell has repeatedly acknowledged his indebtedness to Wittgenstein for some of the basic ideas of Logical Atomismideas that are embodied in the Tractatus and that are still being presupposed, criticized, or defended in current issues of leading philosophical journals. The earliest Logical Positivists, members of the Vienna Circle, devoted themselves for a time to the study of the Tractatus, though the extent to which they understood its fundamental teachings is a matter still being debated by philosophers today. Much of what is loosely called Oxford Philosophy or Ordinary Language Philosophy can be appreciated only as reaction to and struggle against the linguistic doctrines of the Tractatus. Still other analytical philosophers who are not to be identified as either logical atomists or positivists or ordinary language philosophers have been strongly influenced by the conception of philosophy set forth in the Tractatus.

Quite apart from the historical influence it has had the Tractatus is of interest and importance in its own right. There is room for disagreement, however, as to what is most important in it. What one holds to be of greatest significance in the Tractatus will depend in great measure upon ones interpretation of that work and ones assessment of the correctness of its doctrines. We have no intention in these introductory remarks of trying to settle any issues of interpretation or evaluation of specific doctrines. We are more interested in indicating the aims and scope of the work.

The significance of the Tractatus in the twentieth century may fruitfully be compared with that of Descartes works in the sixteenth. Each of the two men developed a genuinely philosophical response to an important contemporary intellectual achievement that was a turning point in the total culture of the West. Descartes responded to the new mathematical physics produced by Copernicus and Galileo which not only changed mans conception of the world in which he lived, but was destined to change the world itself with the technology it brought in its train. Wittgenstein responded to the new mathematicallogic produced by Frege, Whitehead, and Russell which not only changed mans conception of the nature of mathematics and logic but promises (or threatens) to change the world with the new cybernetic devices of computers and automata whose design and construction is made possible by the new mathematical logic. It does not seem to have been sufficiently realized as yet that the mathematical logic to whose development Wittgenstein contributed, and the mathematical physics to whose development Descartes contributed, are of the same order of magnitude as revolutionary intellectual forces making for radical social change.