Climbing Up the Ladder: Nonsense and Textual Strategy in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

This paper is the work of two fictional authors, the late Johannes Philologus and Johannes Commentarius. One part consists of Philologus’s philosophical reflections on a fragment that, unbeknownst to him, is identical to the first four paragraphs of the Preface and the last two numbered propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Commentarius writes a preface to Philologus’s article and a commentary on it, in which he, like Philologus, addresses the question of how a work consisting of nonsense can be elucidatory. By publishing his contribution together with that of Philologus, Commentarius wants to produce a work mirroring the structure of the Tractatus itself.