ABSTRACT
Philosophers who embrace facts think of the world as structured into mind-independent units, in virtue of which our sentences or propositions are true. Sentences, propositions and beliefs represent the world; facts are represented. Ludwig Wittgenstein was born into a large and wealthy Viennese family in 1889. He enrolled to study with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, and the two soon entered into a vigorous and combative relationship. The Tractatus is written in a series of short, numbered paragraphs. It contains no explicitly formulated arguments and is probably the most compressed work of philosophy ever produced. Elementary propositions are contingent and logically independent of each other. Their sole function is to represent reality by picturing or mirroring the world. Objects are held to be simple, necessary and eternal. Interpreters differ over the nature of Wittgenstein's simple objects. An interesting development in recent metaphysics has been the elaboration and defence of truthmaker theory.
