“A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.” Wittgenstein on the Road
How to read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus remains a contested question. Is the
book intended to advance a theory? Is it meant to lay out an atomistic metaphysics? A theory of
truth and meaning? A logical theory? Or does it aim at showing that such theories are impossible?
How does one get from its initial assertion that the world is everything that is the case to the conclusion that one must overcome its propositions to see the world in the right way? The Tractatus
maps, in fact, Wittgenstein’s trajectory of thought through the course of the First World War.
It follows the transformations of his thinking from his initial commitment to Russell’s logical
atomism to his subsequent struggle with the question of the meaning of life. Far from advancing
a philosophical proposition or a set of such propositions the work is meant to delineate, instead,
a new kind of philosophical practice in which the constant transformation of thought, the readiness to always see things in new ways is essential.
