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This volume brings into focus the unique philosophical and historical importance of Wittgenstein's pre-Tractatus writings. These contributed essays show that Wittgenstein's earliest writings are worth studying for their own sake. They also reveal how much one can still learn about the Tractatus, if we are to study these early writings not as documenting one's prior interpretation of the Tractatus, but as a series of steps in Wittgenstein's thought, some down paths that are later abandoned, some leading towards it. The volume thus offers not only a fresh perspective on the pre-Tractatus writings, but also a comprehensive reading of a wide range of central topics from the very first letters, the "Notes on Logic", the "Notes dictated to G.E. Moore" to the three surviving war-time notebooks
List of contents
1. Introduction, Mathieu Marion and Jimmy Plourde.- 2. Wittgenstein's pre-Tractatus Conception of Philosophy: From the originally assumed view of the task of philosophy to the symbolic turn and isomorphism, Jimmy Plourde.- 3. The Early Wittgenstein's Atomic Logic, Categories and the Necessary A Posteriori, Fraser MacBride.- 4. A Path to the Tractatus: From Facts and Forms through Picturing to Modality, Sanford Shieh.- 5. Essence and Modality: From Husserl to Wittgenstein, Kevin Mulligan.- 6. Is There Room for a Transcendental Aesthetic in Wittgenstein's Early Thought?, Hanne Appelqvist.- 7. How does a tautology say nothing?, Ian Proops.- 8. Analysis of a Conversation on the Sheffer stroke and W-F schemes between Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein in April 1913,Martin Pilch.- 9. Wittgenstein on Negation, Bipolarity, and Symmetry, Guido Bonino.- 10. "To fulfill the purposeof existence": Wittgenstein's Notebooks and the search for meaning, Janyne Sattler.
About the author
Mathieu Marion, FRSC is full professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. He is the author of Wittgenstein, Finitism and the Foundations of Mathematics, and of numerous articles on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.
Jimmy Plourde is Assistant professor of Analytic philosophy at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. His research interests focus on Wittgenstein's early philosophy and its context on which he has published several articles
