As many readers/users of this site, will be aware, it is exactly 90 years since Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published (in German).
It’s also 60 years since Wittgenstein’s death.
And just over a decade since my collection The New Wittgenstein appeared in print.
Yesterday, I received in the mail my publisher’s free copies of my new book, Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein debate, in which my own piece argues that we need to take the ‘new’, resolute Wittgenstein very seriously indeed: I suggest that Conant and Diamond themselves have not been ‘severe’/'austere’ enough in their presentation of Wittgenstein’s first book. That it really does not say anything at all…
Enough said?
Check the book out: http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-new-book.html
If you have thoughts or comments about it, it would be interesting to hear them here.
Rupert, I’m curious about three questions:
a) Do you think that Wittgenstein’s simple objects are known only a posteriori, and hence that Wittgenstein was (to use a phrase from C. Johnston) self-consciously agnostic about what counts as a simple object?
b) Is Gerd Graßhoff correct in claiming that Hertzian points in space are an example of a simple object (in the Tractatus)?
c) If the answer to both questions is “yes”, then to what extent can the two points be reconciled?
I have given an unconventional critique of the Tractatus in “The Wittgenstein Enigma” which can be found in my blog and is included in The Sphinx and the Phoenix (2009).