Major Works

by Wittgenstein, Ludwig

• ISBN13: 9780061550249
• ISBN10: 0061550248
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-15
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Major Works is the finest single-volume anthology of influential philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's important writings. Featuring the complete texts of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Blue and Brown Books: Studies for 'Philosophical Investigations,' and On Certainty, this new collection selects from the early, middle, and later career of this revolutionary thinker, widely recognized as one of the most profound minds of all time.

Excerpts

Major Works
Selected Philosophical Writings

Chapter One

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

1
The world is everything that is the case.

1.1
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11
The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.

1.12
For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

1.13
The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2
The world divides into facts.

1.21
Anyone can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.

2
What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

2.01
An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).

2.011
It is essential to a thing that it can be a constituent part of an atomic fact.

2.012
In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing.

2.0121
It would, so to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist alone on its own account, subsequently a state of affairs could be made to fit.

If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them.

(A logical entity cannot be merely possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.)

Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things.

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.

2.0122
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. (It is impossible for words to occur in two different ways, alone and in the proposition.)

2.0123
If I know an object, then I also know all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts.

(Every such possibility must lie in the nature of the object.)

A new possibility cannot subsequently be found.

2.01231
In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.

2.0124
If all objects are given, then thereby are all possible atomic facts also given.

2.013
Everything is, as it were, in a space of possible atomic facts. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space.

2.0131
A spatial object must lie in infinite space. (A point in space is a place for an argument.)

A speck in a visual field need not be red, but it must have a colour; it has, so to speak, a colour space round it. A tone must have a pitch, the object of the sense of touch a hardness, etc.

2.014
Objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs.

2.0141
The possibility of its occurrence in atomic facts is the form of the object.

2.02
The object is simple.

2.0201
Every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes.

2.021
Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound.

2.0211
If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.

2.0212
It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).

2.022
It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something—a form—in common with the real world.

2.023
This fixed form consists of the objects.

2.0231
The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the propositions—first formed by the configuration of the objects.

2.0232
Roughly speaking: objects are colourless.

2.0233
Two objects of the same logical form are—apart from their external properties—only differentiated from one another in that they are different.

2.02331
Either a thing has properties which no other has, and then one can distinguish it straight away from the others by a description and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things which have the totality of their properties in common, and then it is quite impossible to point to any one of them.

For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish it—for otherwise it would be distinguished.

2.024
Substance is what exists independently of what is the case.

2.025
It is form and content.

2.0251
Space, time and colour (colouredness) are forms of objects.

2.026
Only if there are objects can there be a fixed form of the world.

2.027
The fixed, the existent and the object are one.

2.0271
The object is the fixed, the existent; the configuration is the changing, the variable.

2.0272
The configuration of the objects forms the atomic fact.

2.03
In the atomic fact objects hang one in another, like the members of a chain.

2.031
In the atomic fact the objects are combined in a definite way.

2.032
The way in which objects hang together in the atomic fact is the structure of the atomic fact.

2.033
The form is the possibility of the structure.

2.034
The structure of the fact consists of the structures of the atomic facts.

2.04
The totality of existent atomic facts is the world.

2.05
The totality of existent atomic facts also determines which atomic facts do not exist.

2.06
The existence and nonexistence of atomic facts is the reality.(The existence of atomic facts we also call a positive fact, their nonexistence a negative fact.)

2.061
Atomic facts are independent of one another.

Major Works
Selected Philosophical Writings. Copyright © by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Major Works: Selected Philosophical Writings by Ludwig Wittgenstein
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