ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) came from a wealthy and cultured Jewish
family in Vienna. It provided Ludwig with what he later called his “good intellec-
tual nursery-training”. This included Karl Kraus’s brilliant polemics against the
abuse of language in the late Habsburg Empire, the scientific and philosophical
writings of the physicists Heinrich Hertz and Friedrich Boltzmann and the tran-
scendental idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer. From 1906 Wittgenstein studied
engineering in Berlin and Manchester. He developed an interest in the founda-
tions of mathematics that led him to the writings of Frege and Russell. In 1911
he went to Cambridge to work with Russell. The Tractatus is the eventual result
of this supremely fruitful yet equally fraught intellectual encounter. It was
finished in 1918, while Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army, and it remained
the only philosophical book he published during his lifetime. He always referred
to it as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. Nevertheless, the title G. E. Moore
suggested for the English edition, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, has carried the
day and has become an academic household name. Alas, the work itself has
remained obscure. Exegetical controversies rage not just about matters of detail
but about the very nature of the book.
