“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”*…
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a 75 page book in his twenties, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that he thought solved philosophy, then stepped away from the field. Years later, he came back and spent the rest of his life dismantling and reconstructing many of his own ideas (as reflected in his second book, Philosophical Investigations).
Marco Giancotti has created a new way to read the famously-difficult Tractatus…
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote most of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while fighting in World War I. When he was done, he believed this book made philosophy obsolete, so he found a job as an elementary school teacher. While he would later change his mind on its finality, the Tractatus remains one of the most important works of philosophy to this day.
The Tractatus has an unusual shape: it is not a sequence of chapters but a tree of statements and sub-statements and sub-sub-statements. At its root, it is made of only seven brief statements. In other words, it is not a linear read but a branching set of rabbit-holes.
This page is an attempt at making that tree maximally traversable and interactive. Use the tools available to explore, make cross-sections, annotate, fold and sculpt the book the way you prefer. Save any set of pins as a named thread in the control panel, or bookmark the page in your browser. Export the result as a Markdown or PDF file to keep, or share a special link that reopens your annotated version of the book in someone else’s browser...
A new way into Wittgenstein: “The Foldable Tractatus,” from @marcogiancotti.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy.
Read (Wittgenstein’s mentor, then later, antagonist) Bertrand Russell‘s introduction to the Tractatus on Project Gutenberg.
* Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
###
As we fumble with philosophy, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Theodor Adorno; he was born on this date in 1903. A philosopher, cultural, and music critic, he was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, he authored numerous works—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics—that strongly influenced the European New Left.
A classically-trained musician (who studied composition with Alban Berg), Adorno devoted his final (and posthumously-published) book, Aesthetic Theory, which he had planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, to arguing against the “fatal separation” of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and to exploding the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion.
Adorno critiqued all forms of positivism as responsible for technocracy and disenchantment and sought to produce a theory that both rejected positivism and avoided reinstating traditional metaphysics. He has been criticized for over-applying the term “positivism,” especially in his interpretations of Wittgenstein (and Karl Popper) as positivist.
#Adorno #AlbanBerg #BertrandRussell #culture #FrankfurtSchool #history #logic #LudwigWittgenstein #PhilosophicalInvestigations #philosophy #philosophyOfLanguage #philosophyOfMind #TheodorAdorno #TractatusLogicoPhilosophicus #Wittgenstein
