Abstract

Fifty years ago, after two years of research under Russell and four years’ war service which sharpened their differences, Wittgenstein completed the manuscript of his Tractatus Logco-Philosophicus A German edition appeared in 1921 and the first London edition with a facing English translation was published in 1922. A tightly compressed set of aphoristic statements, numbered decimally in some eighty octavo pages, whose laconic precision captured the post-war mood of scientific positivism, it was welcomed in an Introduction by Russell’s cautious accolade: ‘to have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance’. In spite of the author’s fear that he had sown a new jargon, Logical Positivism claimed his inspiration; and the work’s success was only equalled by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, its antidote and inspiration of the supplanting movement of linguistic analysis. Few philosophers have achieved such a brilliant thesis and antithesis, leaving their creative synthesis without hubris to a respectful posterity.