The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in philosophy, literature, history, cultural studies, and related fields.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The TU Library collection also includes other books by and about Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a Latin phrase meaning treatise on logic and philosophy. The title suggests that the author intends his work to discuss logic and philosophy through demonstrations that should convince every reader.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a significant work of modern philosophy, but Wittgenstein immodestly claimed that his book resolved all the problems of philosophy.

Through a logical analysis of philosophical language, he states that most of the work of philosophy is senseless.

Wittgenstein asserts that philosophers should only speak of things they can contribute something substantive about, such as inferences derived from the natural sciences.

On all other matters, from ethics to aesthetics, they should remain silent.

Wittgenstein’s text is controversial and resists easy interpretation.

For this reason it has stimulated much debate, including from Wittgenstein himself, who later disagreed with several of the statements that he previously made in the Tractatus.

This new translation from the German original of the Tractatus was done by Professor Michael Beaney, a professor of logic at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland; professor of the history of analytic philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and visiting professor of philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

In the original English translation of around a century ago, Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher and mathematician who was Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, offered an introduction that noted:

Mr. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whether or not it prove to give the ultimate truth on the matters with which it deals, certainly deserves, by its breadth and scope and profundity, to be considered an important event in the philosophical world. Starting from the principles of Symbolism and the relations which are necessary between words and things in any language, it applies the result of this inquiry to various departments of traditional philosophy, showing in each case how traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of Symbolism and out of misuse of language.

The logical structure of propositions and the nature of logical inference are first dealt with. Thence we pass successively to Theory of Knowledge, Principles of Physics, Ethics, and finally the Mystical (das Mystiche).

In order to understand Mr. Wittgenstein’s book, it is necessary to realize what is the problem with which he is concerned. In the part of his theory which deals with Symbolism he is concerned with the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language.

There are various problems as regards language. First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it; this problem belongs to psychology.

Secondly, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean; this problem belongs to epistemology.

Thirdly, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood; this belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject-matter of the sentences in question.

Fourthly, there is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other?

This last is a logical question, and is the one with which Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned. He is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism, i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence ‘means’ something quite definite. In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise.

Thus, logic has two problems to deal with in regard to Symbolism: (1) the conditions for sense rather than nonsense in combinations of symbols; (2) the conditions for uniqueness of meaning or reference in symbols or combinations of symbols. A logically perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and has single symbols which always have a definite and unique meaning.

Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language—not that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is

known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.

This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein’s theory. That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language. It can, in his phraseology, only be shown, not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure.

The first requisite of an ideal language would be that there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples. A name is a simple symbol in the sense that it has no parts which are themselves symbols. In a logically perfect language nothing that is not simple will have a simple symbol.

The symbol for the whole will be a ‘complex’, containing the symbols for the parts. In speaking of a ‘complex’ we are, as will 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, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful’. […]

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