Wittgenstein 1916

The Tractatus is one of the most famous works in the history of philosophy. Because of the unusual range of its philosophical ambitions it has been influential not only in many parts of philosophy itself but also outside philosophy narrowly conceived: it has a cultural reach that wholly transcends subject boundaries. But Wittgenstein's conception of the book changed radically while he was writing it. When he began, it was a narrow work on logic and metaphysics, whose concluding sentence explained the general form of propositions, i.e. the logical structure of the declarative sentences we use to make assertions about the world around us. By the time the book was finished, however, it had grander ambitions: now he claimed to be able to show how the claims of ethics, aesthetics and religion, although they do not share this logical structure, can nonetheless be seen as based on it. The aim of this research project is to explore the forces which led Wittgenstein to expand so dramatically his vision of the scope of the book. My primary focus will be the third of his surviving wartime notebooks, which charts the development of his thoughts during the summer of 1916 when his work 'broadened out from the foundations of logic to the essence of the world'.