If Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus radically redefines the scope of philosophy, it has proved irresistibly suggestive to literary theorists, poets, and artists.

Having only so many fingers, we humans like to divide up history by multiples of ten. This year literary types around the world are celebrating the centenaries of The Waste Land and Ulysses; just as enthusiastically, philosophers are marking the 100th anniversary of a work as rebarbatively modernist as anything by Eliot or Joyce — the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Arranged in numbered propositions and sub-propositions like those of Euclid’s Elements or Spinoza’s Ethics, the Tractatus was the young Wittgenstein’s attempt to work out a comprehensive account of the relationship between language and reality, what has been called his “picture theory”: the structure of our language represents the structure of the world in the same way that a picture represents what it depicts. The Tractatus rules out as unphilosophical, even “senseless,” many of the questions that have traditionally occupied philosophers — ethics, aesthetics, the “meaning of life.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.