LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN  Philosophy as envisaged by the Tractatus is

therefore a futile attempt to say what cannot be

 extraordinarily wealthy but tragically dysfunctional meaningfully said but which can only show itself. 
Viennese family.   Philosophy, insofar as it is possible at all, cannot be
 Wittgenstein has a deeply ambivalent status – he a body of doctrines. It must be an activity. It must
has authority, but not influence. aim not, like science, at truth and knowledge, but
 The perception is that he is difficult, obscure and only at clarity and, with the achievement of that
intense, severe and mystical, charismatic and clarity, peace.
strange, driven and tragic, with his charisma and  Propositions of the Tractatus are like rungs on a
difficulty bound up with his character and his life. ladder. We use them to climb up to a position
 Wittgenstein saw philosophy not just as a vocation, where we can see things as they are, where we can
but as a way of life he had to lead.  “see the world aright”. But then we throw the
 Traveller ladder away.
 lived for periods in Ireland, Norway, Russia, the US
and, in the UK, Cambridge, Manchester, Swansea Philosophical Investigations
and Newcastle.
 philosophy at Cambridge.   new conception of ourselves – of language and of
mind
 only one book in his lifetime – the Tractatus-
Logico-Philosophicus (1921)   784 questions asked in the Investigations. Of those
only 110 are answered. And of those answers, 70
 reputation is based on the huge collection of
are meant to be wrong.
manuscripts and notes  known as the Nachlass
 discusses the nature of language and mind, and the
  the central work is the posthumous Philosophical
confusions about both 
Investigations (1953).
 not a single ladder to climb. Instead it shows us
Tractatus Logico the paths up a series of hills and promontories, from
which we may gain different overviews of the
 that we are fundamentally thinking, knowing, landscape and, with luck, see the light gradually
representing beings. dawn.
 we are conscious thinkers.   two pictures or collections of pictures. One is a way
 Before we communicate, we must first have of conceiving of the inner and the outer: our
something to communicate. subjective inner lives and our outer behaviour in a
world of others. We think of our inner lives as
States of Affairs being like an internal space in which there exist
various things, states and processes: thoughts,
 combinations of things – that obtain: the facts. emotions, sensations. What we do is merely the
(Hence “The world is the totality of facts, not of outward sign of this inner reality: behaviour.
things”.)  The other picture or set of pictures is a way of
 We must first be capable of true and false thoughts conceiving of how language works. We think that
about the world: to be able to think about things, language is primarily a matter of naming things.
and combinations of things   Language is really a collection of private, inner acts
of meaning and naming, a collection of private
Logical Form languages that happen, more or less imperfectly, to
overlap. (Language games)
 the world, language and thought must share a
common form of elements and their possible
arrangements. 
 It follows that if we think or say anything
meaningful, then what we think or say must be
capable of being true or false. 
 Otherwise what we say or think will be senseless.

Implications

 we are ethical beings. The ethical is real. Teaching

us how to live in the light of that thought was,
Wittgenstein believed, the true aim of
the Tractatus.