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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Study in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

A Study in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Maslow, Alexander

Paperback

Philosophy

ISBN10: 0520376781
ISBN13: 9780520376786
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: Jan 1 1961
Pages: 184
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.43 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A Study in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, by Alexander Maslow is a rigorous, historically situated guide to one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic philosophical texts. Writing with candor about the Tractatus's terse, cryptic, aphoristic style, Maslow offers a lucid reconstruction of its core claims while acknowledging the interpretive perils the book poses even to specialists. Drawing on first-hand interlocutors and early readers--Bertrand Russell, F. P. Ramsey, and Moritz Schlick--he situates Wittgenstein at the tense intersection of logical positivism and metaphysical longing, tracing how the clear voices of Frege and Russell intermingle with the muffled echoes of Kant, Schopenhauer, Plato, and Augustine. Maslow's central wager is both bold and clarifying: read the Tractatus as an inquiry into the formal preconditions of language--and thus of world-constitution--yielding a picture that approaches a Kantian phenomenalism with language playing the role of transcendental form.

The book's architecture mirrors its thesis. Early chapters develop the grammar of objects and atomic facts, and the distinction between sign and symbol; the technical middle chapter treats molecular propositions as truth-functions, logic, and the Principia, while the culminating chapter turns to method--philosophy as clarification--before engaging Wittgenstein's notorious gestures toward solipsism and the mystical. Maslow neither domesticates nor sensationalizes these moments; he shows how they complete the Tractatus's demand that what can be said be said clearly--and that what cannot be said nevertheless shows itself. The result is a compelling, self-aware companion for advanced students and scholars seeking a disciplined, historically informed path through the Tractatus's obscurities without losing sight of its intellectual daring.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

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