Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy

The recent Tractatus Wars appeared to have been fought over the nature of nonsense and Wittgensteinian methodology, leaving the Tractatus itself largely unscathed. In the present volume of post-War studies, the text of the Tractatus and its philosophical–historical contexts have mostly regained the centre of attention. Roughly, a third of the volume focus solely on the influence of Russell and Frege, especially on how Russell's struggles with his multiple-relation theories of judgement lead to salient features of the Tractatus. The core idea of the multiple-relation theory is that in making a judgement a thinker is related not to a single entity (a proposition) constituted by a relation relating various terms, but to those terms and that relation. The theory notoriously runs into trouble with some apparently non-negotiable features of judgement: (a) a judgement represents not a mere list of entities but a combination of them, (b) judgements cannot represent certain combination of entities at all, e.g., a combination of two relations, (c) certain entities can be represented as combined in more than one way, e.g., two terms and an asymmetrical relation, and (d) in general a judgement may be true or be false.

Epistemology · Focus (optics) · Judgement · Nonsense · Proposition · Relation (database) · Computer Science · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications