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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... constructing a logically perfect language , but that the whole function of language is to have meaning , and it only ... constructed , be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact . This is ...
... set of propositions can be constructed out of either of the two functions " not - p or not - q " or " not - p and not - q . " Wittgenstein makes use of the latter , assuming a know- 99 " " ledge of Dr Sheffer's work . The 13 INTRODUCTION.
... constructed out of " not - p and not - q is easy to see . " Not - p and not - p " is equivalent to " not - p , " hence we obtain a definition of negation in terms of our primitive function : hence we can define " p or q , ' since this ...
... constructed in the above manner from atomic propositions , and in this way the totality of pro- positions is defined . ( The apparent exceptions which we mentioned above are dealt with in a manner which we shall consider later ...
... constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extra- ordinary difficulty and importance . This merit , in my opinion , belongs to Mr Wittgenstein's book , and makes it one which no ...