Abstract

Prolegomena to Wittgenstein's Tractatus are needed to mediate certain puzzling oppositions. At the most basic level, there is an opposition between a properly philosophical Tractatus and a peculiarly poetic one. Wittgenstein himself assures us that the former exists, describing his work as follows: "It is quite strictly speaking the presentation of a system. And this presentation is extremely compressed since I have only retained in it that which really occurred to me---and how it occurred to me." It is this compression that suggests the existence of a poetic Tractatus. Wittgenstein is disinclined to fully articulate his system out of allegiance to an obscure aesthetic ideal, which, in turn, has philosophical origins. The first four chapters of the dissertation attempt to mediate these philosophical and poetic aspects. They threaten to obscure each other but can be rendered mutually illuminating. ;The remaining eleven chapters explore a still more complex series of oppositions. In the scholarly literature at least four fundamentally different types of arguments are championed as the argument for Wittgenstein metaphysics. They are, briefly: Wittgenstein's system is speculative and deductive ; it is positivistic; it is to be established by a Kantian-style transcendental argument concerning the conditions of meaning; it is a sort of reductio ad absurdum on itself---i.e. is intended to reveal itself as nonsense, thereby teaching salutary lessons about the limits of philosophy. ;These readings are striking for their mutual divergences; also, I argue, for their individual inadequacies. Yet none of -- is more than half wrong. I impute a fifth argument for Wittgenstein's metaphysics: it is a purification of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, under the influence of Wittgenstein's study of Frege and Russell. Schopenhauer declares that philosophy consists of a single thought: 'The world is my representation'. Wittgenstein alters this to read: 'The world is all that is the case'. When the import of this alteration is understood, many puzzling oppositions within the Tractatus resolve themselves