Quotes About Tractatus

The basic evil of Russell's logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is is illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then presupposed as understood in full generality.

Wittgenstein sent the Tractatus to several publishers who rejected it, including his own university press — Cambridge, which was to distinguish itself by rejecting all his writing.

One anecdote should be recorded. I asked Wittgenstein whether, when he wrote the Tractatus, he had ever decided upon anything as an example of a 'simple object'. His reply was that at that time his thought had been that he was a logician; and that it was not his business, as a logician, to try to decide whether this thing or that was a simple thing or a complex thing, that being a purely empirical matter! It was clear that he regarded his former opinion as absurd.

Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is' (§ 6.44). 1 believe that a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced by Wittgenstein, not only during the Tractatus period, but also when I knew him.4 Whether this feeling has anything to do with