Thursday 9/27

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5-5.641

Discussion Questions

First Question: Causation

What are his reasons for making the very strong claims at 5.1361 that,

We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Second Question: Freedom of Will

Is it an adequate solution to the problem of freedom of will that we say (5.1362) "[t]he freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical inference.—The connexion between knowledge and what is known is that of logical necessity"? What is the problem of freedom of will in the first place?

Third Question: The Limits of My World

(Please note that this question and the next skip quite a bit of material which involves his responses to Frege and, in particular, Russell and Whitehead's development of type theory in the Principia Mathematica.) At 5.6, Wittgenstein provocatively (and famously) asserts that "[t]he limits of my language mean the limits of my world." He elucidates the point in a series of propositions following it, including:

Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.

We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.

The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

What is Wittgenstein claiming here? In particular, why does he repeatedly emphasize my world and my language?

Fourth Question: The Self

Beginning with "I am my world" (5.63) and ending with "[t]he philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it" (5.641), Wittgenstein characterizes the subject qua self insofar as philosophy is concerned. What is the self, for Wittgenstein?