ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the thesis about the relation between philosophy and literature. Nonsense became a philosophical category only in the early twentieth century and was first introduced by, Bertrand Russell with the theory of types. Nonsense was given a deeper dimension by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus with the distinction between the sayable and the unsayable. The aspect of the Tractatus was totally missed by logical positivism which sought to use the verification theory of meaning to distinguish the meaningful statements of empirical science from the nonsensical pseudo-statements of metaphysics. Wittgenstein went on to provide a still richer exploration of nonsense in the Philosophical Investigations where he locates a craving for nonsense in certain deep aspects of our language and our life. It is this craving that he believes is responsible for much of traditional philosophy which, on his view, turns out to be grounded in conceptual confusion and therefore a kind of nonsense.
