A rearrangement of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

I had a look at Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus recently, and the format is crying out for expression with an outliner. I poked around on the internet for a while, and I couldn't find it. So, I did it myself. Here it is:

The Tractatus in an outliner.

Reading it this way brings out the coherence of some of the structure of this book. It's particularly impressive since Wittgenstein didn't have any such software to play around with.

I built it from a Project Gutenberg e-text, though I've corrected some typos and put in some sections that had been left out of the e-text. I've also cleaned up the notation for the mathematics, which had become mangled in the e-text version. The only major problem is that I couldn't include any of the diagrams from the original book. But this isn't too serious, as Wittgenstein doesn't rely very heavily on the diagrams.

It is clear that, on its own terms, the Tractatus is nonsense. Wittgenstein was well aware of this when he wrote it. The trouble is that most of it is in fact perfectly sensible use of language and so, not being nonsense, it shows itself to be false. We could, perhaps, imagine that Wittgenstein's project was more modest: To set up a bastion of sensible language without commenting on the sense of the remainder (with which that bastion is constructed). But even this fails, since the set-up of the bastion relies on a classical foundationalism which has been smashed by quantum mechanics, as I hope to explain in my next post.