preview

Wittgenstein Tractatus Sparknotes

Decent Essays

In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, he discusses and develops his view on the nature and relation of the world, fact, atomic fact, object, simplicity and complexity. Wittgenstein starts with asserting what the world is, and then builds each concept. In this paper, I will expound upon each concept and what I believe he is expressing with each one. “The world,” he claims, “is everything that is the case… [it] is the totality of facts, not of things,” (Ogden translation, 1-1.1). Things are existing in the world, but they do not tell us anything about the world. Facts tell us about the objects (or things), their properties, and their relation to each other. The totality of these facts make up the world and determine both what is and what is not …show more content…

He says, “If I can think of an object in the context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context. The thing is independent, in so far as it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with the atomic fact, a form of dependence,” (2.0122). With this, he is asserting that objects have the possibility to be apart of one another, composing atomic facts, but are not necessarily limited their possibilities. I think of this as it can both be possible and true that my keys are on the dining room table, or hanging by the door, or in my purse. All of these are possibilities and true at different points in time. He then goes on to say that objects have their own, specific properties and contain all possibilities of these properties, or state of affairs (2.0131-14). However, objects are simple and form the substance of the world, which without, we could not form a picture of the world; any complex statement or proposition can be broken down and analyzed by their parts (2.02-0212). To put simply, without having a foundation with which to build complex ideas and atomic facts, we could not think about the world because we would have nothing to base our thought on. Furthermore, he states that objects are fixed and therefore there is a fixed form of the world (2.026). I do not

Get Access