An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Undergraduate / Graduate

This will be an introductory course on Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The seminar will be organized around the following proposal: the book is meant to reveal the sort of understanding that is at stake whenever a philosophical problem arises. It teaches that such understanding is not a form of knowledge - and in particular not scientific knowledge- of whether or why something is the case. Its clarification of the sort of understanding at issue here allows for a reading according to which the Tractatus, contrary to what most commentators assume, seeks to affirm rather than to cancel philosophy. It affirms it as a fundamental concern with understanding distinct from science or from reason.