Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"Philosophy is not a theory," asserted Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), "but an activity." In this 1921 opus, his only philosophical work published during his lifetime, Wittgenstein defined the object of philosophy as the logical clarification of thoughts and proposed the solution to most philosophic problems by means of a critical method of linguistic analysis. In proclaiming philosophy as a matter of logic rather than of metaphysics, Wittgenstein created a sensation among intellectual circles that influenced the development of logical positivism and changed the direction of 20th-century thought. |
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... appear later , sinning against the rules of philosophical grammar , but this is unavoidable at the outset . " Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but senseless . We cannot ...
... appear presently , that such exceptions are only apparent , and that every function of a proposition is really a truth - function . It follows that if we can define truth - functions generally , we can obtain a general definition of all ...
... appears to be not a logically necessary principle . Accord- ing to this principle x is identical with y if every property of x is a property of y , but it would , after all , be logically possible for two things to have exactly the same ...
... only be shown . That the world is my world appears in the fact that the boundaries of language ( the only language I understand ) indicate the boundaries of my world . The metaphysical subject does not belong to 18 INTRODUCTION.
... appear as though we were dealing with a relation between a person and a proposition . This cannot , of course , be the ultimate analysis , since persons are fictions and so are propositions , except in the sense in which they are facts ...