Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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Work · Analytic Philosophy

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

1921 · by Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is all that is the case … Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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Introduction

Wittgenstein completed the manuscript in 1918 while on leave from the Austrian army and carried it with him into an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. After several publishers had turned it down, it appeared in 1921 in Wilhelm Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie, and in 1922 in a bilingual edition in London with an introduction by Russell, which Wittgenstein felt misunderstood the book; the Latin title was suggested by G. E. Moore. The text consists of seven main propositions, with decimal numbers marking comments on them. A sentence pictures a possible state of affairs; logical form shows itself but cannot be said. Near the end Wittgenstein calls his own propositions a ladder to be thrown away after one has climbed it.