Abstract

Since its publication in 1922, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has changed the face of modern logic and, whether rightly or wrongly interpreted, lent its ideas to such typically 20th Century movements as Logical Atomism and Vienna Circle Positivism. Mr. Stenius turns back to the Tractatus with a deep though critical commitment to the view of language which it upholds. Its ‘picture’ theory of sentence-meaning, he feels, offers a key to many problems about how language functions. To get a notion of what Mr. Stenius does in this book, it is helpful to keep in mind the problems Wittgenstein tried to meet.