ABSTRACT
In his essay on trauma and the experience of war in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Thomas Macho once again takes up the biographical connection between Wittgenstein’s experiences as a soldier on the Eastern Front, the Tractatus, and Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language. While on the Eastern Front, Wittgenstein read in a newspaper that dolls and little models of buses were used in a Paris courtroom to re-create a car accident in all its factual aspects [tatsächlich] in order to resolve the case through pictorial arrangements. Wittgenstein later referred to this newspaper item as the source of his picture theory of language. The model—a reenacted scenario—portrays the case: it depicts the actual event in its proportional miniature. If a model can function like a proposition, then certainly propositions could also be understood as models that portray the world. And it is interesting to imagine this thought-model within the context of the experience of contingency in the 1910s and 1920s.
