ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the debate over Wittgenstein's Tractatus, specifically the question as to why Wittgenstein would have written a book which, by its own lights, has to be considered largely nonsensical. For not only is the Tractatus a book that closes by acknowledging that it is nonsense, it makes recognizing that it is, a requirement of 'understanding' it. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein distinguishes three kinds of proposition: genuine propositions with a sense; senseless but nonetheless well-formed propositions; and nonsense. Genuine propositions are bipolar. Nonsense, then, is a failure to say how things stand in the world and thereby express a sense. The formal properties and relations of propositions manifest the 'internal' properties and relations of the objects or the states of the affairs they depict, those that it is unthinkable the object or states of affairs should not possess.
