“[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry.” —Linda Voris, Boston Review Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein’s remark that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the “poet.” What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal. “This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.” —Linda Munk, American Literature “Wittgenstein’s Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds.” —David Clippinger, Chicago Review “Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original.” —Willard Bohn, SubStance

"Pulling up the Ladder" discusses how Wittgenstein's early philosophy became widely known largely through the efforts of Russell and other empirically-minded British philosophers, and to a lesser extent, the scientifically-oriented German-speaking philosophers of the Vienna Circle. However, Wittgenstein's primary philosophical concerns arose in a far different context, and failure to grasp this has led to many misunderstandings of the "Tractatus". From Brockhaus' investigation of that context and its problems emerges this new interpretation of Wittgenstein's early thought, which also affords fresh insights into the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's first philosophy was a Schopenhauerian neo-Kantianism, and although he soon rejected much of the substance of Schopenhauer's work, his problems remained closely connected with Schopenhauer's view of the world and man's relation to it. Wittgenstein's early philosophy is a departure from Schopenhauer - a rigorously purified form, so to speak, of Schopenhauer's "World as Will and Representation". In "Pulling up the Ladder", Brockhaus explains Schopenhauer's system of the world as Will and Representation, then proceeds to investigate Frege's realism and Hertz's conventionalistic philosophy of science - two of the elements which fuelled Wittgenstein's purification of Schopenhauer.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) remains one of the most enigmatic works of twentieth century thought. In this bold and original new study, Ben Ware argues that Wittgenstein's early masterpiece is neither an analytic treatise on language and logic, nor a quasi-mystical work seeking to communicate 'ineffable' truths. Instead, we come to understand the Tractatus by grasping it in a twofold sense: first, as a dialectical work which invites the reader to overcome certain 'illusions of thought'; and second as a modernist work whose anti-philosophical ambition is intimately tied to its radical aesthetic character. By placing the Tractatus in the force field of modernism, Dialectic of the Ladder clears the ground for a new and challenging exploration of the work's ethical dimension. It also casts new light upon the cultural, aesthetic and political significances of Wittgenstein's writing, revealing hitherto unacknowledged affinities with a host of philosophical and literary authors, including Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Kafka.

This thesis is an investigation into the collapse of the doctrine in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein's first book. Part I focuses on the problems that Wittgenstein's logical atomism encountered. In the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein credits his friend, Frank Ramsey, with convincing him that there were 'grave mistakes' in the Tractatus. If the arguments presented in Ramsey's "Critical Notice" of the Tractatus (1923) are representative of those he presented to Wittgenstein personally, then a review of the article will simultaneously accomplish the goals of introducing the Tractatus and outlining the reason for its collapse. Wittgenstein articulates the problem entailed by Ramsey's criticism precisely, in terms of the truth-functionality thesis, in his paper "Some Remarks on Logical Form" (1929). However, rather than go on to develop a rule of exclusion in defence of the truth-functionality thesis, as is called for in the paper, Wittgenstein abandons, not just the paper, but the Tractatus. The 'exclusion' problem raised against the truth-functionality thesis is indicative of deeper problem; this is the motivation for Part II. I argue that the Tractatus offers one solution to all the problems of philosophy.

"The book advances the radical proposition that the field in which architecture and philosophy operate includes linguistic and spatial practices. It develops innovative forms of interdisciplinary analyses to demonstrate that the philosophical positions put forth by Wittgenstein's two main works are literally unthinkable outside of their respective conceptions of space: the view from above in the early work and the view from within constructed by the later work."--BOOK JACKET.

Demonstrates that ethical and religious concerns inform even the most technical writings on logic and language. This text also shows that, for Wittgenstein, the need to establish clear limitations is both a logical and an ethical demand, revealing a religious view of the world in his philosophy.

Analytic philosophy--arguably one of the most important philosophical movements in the twentieth century--has gained a new historical self-consciousness, particularly about its own origins. Between 1880 and 1930, the most important work of its founding figures (Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein) not only gained attention but flourished. In this collection, fifteen previously unpublished essays explore different facets of this period, with an emphasis on the vital intellectual relationship between Frege and the early Wittgenstein.

The aim of this book is to consider what reasonably follows from the hypothesis that the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be interpreted from a mystical point of view. Atkinson intends to elucidate Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the mystical in his early writings as they pertain to a number of topics such as, God, the meaning of life, reality, the eternal and the solipsistic self.

Graham Priest presents an expanded edition of his exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Embracing contradiction and challenging traditional logic, he engages with issues across philosophical borders, from the historical to the modern, Eastern to Western, continental to analytic.