ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is one of the great philosophical works of the twentieth century. For the range of its concerns and the depth of its thought its closest companions are two unfinished works: Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Wittgenstein’s own Philosophical Investigations. But even in this company the Tractatus looks eccentric. It is very short, and written in a style which is at least epigrammatic. The character of the work is a reflection of the nature of the man who wrote it, and of his cast of mind when he wrote it. Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Austria in 1889, into
one of the wealthiest families in Europe. His upbringing was one of enormous privilege, but also deeply cultured, and it brought with it an intensity of expectation which was not easy to live with (two of his brothers committed suicide while Wittgenstein was still a boy). After school, he began to study engineering, first in Berlin and then in Manchester. While in Manchester he developed an interest in mathematics,
and then in the foundations of mathematics. He read two ground-breaking works in the foundations of mathematics, which had then only recently been published: Bertrand Russell’s early work, The Principles of Mathematics, and Gottlob Frege’s more-or-less contemporary Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic), which attempts to show that arithmetic rests on nothing more than logic. In 1911 he visited Frege in Jena, who recommended that he study under Russell in Cambridge. By this time Russell’s views had developed and changed.
He had just published, with Alfred North Whitehead, the monumental Principia Mathematica, which develops the general view of Frege’s Grundgesetze in enormous detail and with great technical sophistication — much of which was needed to circumvent a contradiction which Russell had found in Frege’s system. Russell was at this time the great figure in contemporary logic, but, by his own account, worn out from his work on Principia. Wittgenstein attached himself to him, and was something of a pest, pursuing Russell back to his room, and badgering him with questions, even while Russell was dressing. But he was not just a nuisance: he learned extraordinarily fast, and before long Russell felt that Wittgenstein would be the person to carry on the technical logical work which he felt that he himself was no longer up to. By 1913 Wittgenstein was shaping the views on logic
which would later become the backbone of the Tractatus. The first record of these views is the Notes on Logic of that year: this work (now published as an appendix to the later Notebooks) is an important resource for those trying to understand the Tractatus. By the end of 1913, however, Wittgenstein felt that he could no longer do the work he was capable of while staying in Cambridge, so he decided to go and live alone in Norway and work there. In the spring of 1914 he was visited there by G. E. Moore, another Cambridge philosopher, and one of the leaders (Russell was another) of the revolt against Hegelianism which inaugurated analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world. Despite
his seniority, Moore was not even an equal partner in their discussions: in fact, Wittgenstein used him to take down notes which he dictated. These Notes Dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway are also published as an appendix to the Notebooks. In the summer of 1914, however, the First World War
began, and Wittgenstein immediately joined up on the Austrian side. Wittgenstein did not shirk his military duties by any means — indeed, he was keen to be posted to the front and showed extraordinary courage when he was sent there — but he did not stop doing philosophy either. He worked in notebooks, some of which survive and are published as Notebooks 1914-16 (though the last entry is dated January 1917). These begin with questions in the foundations of logic. The very first entry, indeed, reads:
