The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: a centenary disease

Abstract

Albert Maslow points out that Wittgenstein dedicated a copy of the Tractatus to Morris Schlick with the following sentence: “ Jeder disese Sätze  ist der Ausdruck einer Krankheit ” (Each of this propositions is the manifestation of a disease.) We will try to see some of the treatments to see if the remedy is not, in many cases, worse than the disease.

Few philosophical texts have so many material surrounding it as the Tractatus,  but and at the same time do maintain such a vast spectrum of interpretations. To the point that one can expect every now and then, exegetical revolutions. Like the political ones, they usually burry the past in its way. An example: the appearance in the 1980s of Wittgenstein's Vienna was a fundamental milestone that showed that it is impossible to dissociate the author from the Viennese intellectual environment. However, attempts have been made to present this new approach as the refutation of the rest, falsely equating the Tractatus with continental philosophy in a book that is really weak in terms of elements of symbolic logic and without any expertise in regard to the philosophy of logic of Frege and Russell, which are essential to understand the context of the concepts in the text of the Tractatus itself and the records of the time. A similar case is the new interpretation that was awarded some ten years later by the North American school: they rightly called attention to the neglect of the essential paradox of the Tractatus of having intended to say what is shown. However, the value of this perspective is lost when the book is treated as the work of a postmodern nihilist, an antimetaphysical dialectician . The same can be said of the interpretation of Raymond Bradley, whose praiseworthy efforts to highlight the Tractarian modal element have resulted in an inadequate Leibnizian framing in his work The Nature of All Being  (Bradley, 1992).

To show an overview, I would broadly follow the outline of Cerezo (1998), adding and extending his taxonomy a bit. I think Cerezo´s outline is accurate and simple.  Cerezo does not take into account contextualist readings or, in any case, it isnt  her concern  in her Lenguaje y Lógica in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Let us mention among the ways of reading the Tractatus the empiricist perspectives (in classical version, like Russell, or positivist, like those of Shlick and Carnap ), non-empiricist logicists ( Anscombe , Kenny ), Kantian ( Stenius , Coffa ), metaphysical (in actualist variant, Hacker, or positilist Leibnizian , Bradley), continental (such as Janik and Toulmin ) , nihilistic ( Diamond and Conant , Ostrow and his dialectical idea ), and  MacGuinn 's elucidatory -ecumenical attempt .

David Stern  (Stern,1998 ) made a stratification that is not incompatible with the one I point out . 1. The logical-atomistic reading ( logical atomist reading ) of Russell ; 2. The reading of logical positivism ( logical positivist reading ) : with the belligerent antimetaphysical charge ; 3. Metaphysical reading ( metaphysical reading ), like Hacker's, with a logically based idea of metaphysics; 4. The irrationalist reading ( irrationalist reading ) that Toulmin and Janik maintain , for example, or Isidro Reguera, where there is pre-eminence of the religious ethic elements; and 5. therapeutic reading ( therapeutic reading ) , which poses it as a kind of infinity joke. We are going to add to the list a reading, which we will call a pathological reading.