The Early Wittgenstein: The Picture Theory of Meaning

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), an Austrian engineer-turned-philosopher who studied aeronautical engineering at Manchester before moving to Cambridge in 1911 to study logic under Bertrand Russell, composed the bulk of his first major work while serving as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, completing the manuscript in a prisoner-of-war camp in Como and Cassino in 1918. The resulting book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in German in 1921 as "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" and in a parallel German-English edition in 1922, with an introduction by Russell and a translation by C.K. Ogden and Frank Ramsey. The book is organized around seven numbered core propositions, each elaborated by a hierarchically numbered series of remarks (1, 1.1, 1.11, and so on), and it culminates in the famously austere closing proposition, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen).