The significance of the complicated numbering of the propositions in the Tractatus has occasioned much speculation. Wittgenstein's own explanation has, following Stenius, been generally regarded as misleading. But an examination of the Prototractatus reveals that the numbering system was for Wittgenstein principally an aid in the composition of his work. It allowed him to mark out certain propositions which required further work or supplementation, without disturbing the basic structure of the treatise. But the reworking of the Prototractatus to form the (...) Tractatus considerably changed the original order in which the ideas were connected, and thus made it more difficult to understand the Tractatus. Several specific examples make it clear that it is essential to look back at the context of the Prototractatus in order to achieve a correct interpretation of many of the propositions in the Tractatus. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work on the nature of the numbering system of the _Tractatus_ and Wittgenstein’s use of that system in his composition of the _Prototractatus_, the paper sets out the rationale for the online tool called__ __ The University of Iowa Tractatus Map. The map consists of a website with a front page that links to two separate subway-style maps of the hypertextual numbering system Wittgenstein used in his _Tractatus_. One map displays the structure of the published _Tractatus_; the (...) other lays out the structure of the _Prototractatus_. The site makes available the full text of the German and the two canonical English translations.__ __While we envisage the map as a tool that we would like a wide variety of readers to find helpful, we argue that our website amounts to a radically new edition of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, with far-reaching implications for the interpretation of that text. In particular, we claim that our visually compelling presentation of the book’s overall structure delivers on Wittgenstein’s cryptic claim in a letter to his publisher that it is the numbers that “make the book surveyable and clear”. (shrink)

Ethics was the major issue in Wittgenstein’s writings from 1916 to the time of publication of the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. He explicates the notion of “good” in terms of “happiness” and the latter as “accepting the world as it is.” Nonetheless, this reductionistic philosophical program could not get off the ground unless there is a pretty clear conception of the notion of “accepting the world.” In this paper, I shall explore two alternative accounts of this concept. According to the first account, (...) which I dub “the actual world hypothesis,” Wittgenstein had meant accepting the actual world by the term “being good.” The alternative account, “the substance of the world hypothesis,” suggests accepting the substance of the world as the best reading of the Tractatus. Morris and Graver have endorsed the actual world hypothesis, as opposed to the substance of the world hypothesis. In this paper I try to show that they fail to provide good arguments for the former and against the latter. Additionally, I use ideas from McGuinness to illustrate “accepting the substance of the world” in a way that it avoids Graver’s objections. I argue that acceptance of the world ought to be interpreted as “accepting the fact that the world exists.” Finally, I shall point out that despite of his insight about the acceptance of the world, McGuinness misrepresents the relation between accepting the actual world and accepting its substance. (shrink)