Re:Wittgenstein's Ladder
by tiberious726 on Saturday March 25, 2023 @11:19PM
(#35310455)
It's very much intended to be a tearing down of such projects "from the inside". Back in the day, philosophers _actually_ _believed_ they could write down a series of proposition that fully and completely described reality. They even thought they were discovering the fundamental nature of reality with whatever new symbolic logic notation they came up with that week.
I guess they stopped making people read Kant for a while there... These were solved problems
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is, in my view, a mystical text. Its use of mathematical-like notation and arguments make it seem like something akin to Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, or Language, Truth, and Logic, but it is really quite different, with totally different aims and methods. It is not aiming to prove or instill in the reader any kind of propositional knowledge, despite its format. The statements at either end of the text (1. and 6.) are often quite obscure in their meaning. The point is, in my view, to induce the reader to change his mindset, and to discard his previous philosophical beliefs, rather than to acquire new ones.