ABSTRACT
it seems a paradox that the author who wrote “What can be said at all can be said clearly”, has bequeathed us an extremely obscure and perplexing work. Hailed as one of the most influential books in contemporary analytic philosophy, the Tractatus has been systematically misinterpreted. It is these misinterpretations that have exercised the most influence. The Vienna Circle read into it epistemological doctrines that were not there, and dismissed what was not compatible with positivist dogma as “metaphysical vagaries”. 2 J. O. Urmson, in his semi-official history of philosophical analysis between the two World Wars, has argued that the Tractatus is primarily a variation on the logical atomism advocated by Russell in his famous lectures. Urmson presents strong arguments to show that logical positivism was not so much a reaction to classical metaphysics, but an answer to the metaphysics implicit in logical atomism. 3 But the assimilation of the Tractatus to Russell’s logical atomism leads to grave confusions.
