Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein [top inspirational books .txt] 📗

my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.

I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts.

If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. The more the nail has been hit on the head.⁠—Here I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible. Simply because my powers are insufficient to cope with the task.⁠—May others come and do it better.

On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.

L. W.

Vienna, 1918

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 11

The world is everything that is the case.

1.1

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11

The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.

1.12

For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

1.13

The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2

The world divides into facts.

1.21

Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.

2

What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

2.01

An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things).

2.011

It is essential to a thing that it can be a constituent part of an atomic fact.

2.012

In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing.

2.0121

It would, so to speak, appear as an accident, when to a thing that could exist alone on its own account, subsequently a state of affairs could be made to fit.

If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them.

(A logical entity cannot be merely possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.)

Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things.

If I can think of an object in the context of an atomic fact, I cannot think of it apart from the possibility of this context.

2.0122

The thing is independent, in so far as it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of independence is a form of connection with the atomic fact, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to occur in two different ways, alone and in the proposition.)

2.0123

If I know an object, then I also know all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts.

(Every such possibility must lie in the nature of the object.)

A new possibility cannot subsequently be found.

2.01231

In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.

2.0124

If all objects are given, then thereby are all possible atomic facts also given.

2.013

Every thing is, as it were, in a space of possible atomic facts. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space.

2.0131

A spatial object must lie in infinite space. (A point in space is an argument place.)

A speck in a visual field need not be red, but it must have a colour; it has, so to speak, a colour space round it. A tone must have a pitch, the object of the sense of touch a hardness, etc.

2.014

Objects contain the possibility of all states of affairs.

2.0141

The possibility of its occurrence in atomic facts is the form of the object.

2.02

The object is simple.

2.0201

Every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes.

2.021

Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound.

2.0211

If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.

2.0212

It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).

2.022

It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something⁠—a form⁠—in common with the real world.

2.023

This fixed form consists of the objects.

2.0231

The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For these are first presented by the propositions⁠—first formed by the configuration of the objects.

2.0232

Roughly speaking: objects are colourless.

2.0233

Two objects of the same logical form are⁠—apart from their external properties⁠—only differentiated from one another in that they are different.

2.02331

Either a thing has properties which no other has, and then one can distinguish it straight away from the others by a description and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things which have the totality of their properties in common, and then it is quite impossible to point to any one of them.

For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish it⁠—for otherwise it would be distinguished.

2.024

Substance is what exists independently of what is