Pulling Up the Ladder: Metaphysical Roots of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus"

"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. Brockhaus analyzes the relations between the "Tractatus" and Russell's treatment of Incomplete Symbols and Logical Types. He investigates two Schopenhauerian issues which present difficulties for the Wittgensteinian world-view: the principles of mechanics and the propositional attitudes which bring the ego into the world. The final chapters examine the metaphysical ego and its relaxation to value, employing Wittgenstein's metaphor of "my world", since "my world" is permeated by the metaphysical ego, the Schopenhauerian World as Will emerges anew, albeit in a curiously ineffable form.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 The Philosophical Problems of the "Tractatus": A Positive Conception of the "Tractatus"; Problems and Methods. Part 2 Schopenhauer's System of the World: Transcendental Idealism and the Problem of Knowledge; The Four Forms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; The World as Will and Representation. Part 3 Realism and Psychologism in 19th-Century Logic: The Historical and Philosophical Grounds of Psychologism; Psychologism in Logic and Mathematics; Frege's Critique of Psychologism; Logical Realism and the Nature of Logic; The Early Realism of Russell and Moore. Part 4 Analysis and Denoting: Existence, Nonexistence and Being; The Theory of Descriptions and Incomplete Symbols; One Consequence of the Theory of Incomplete Symbols; Analysis, Extensionality and Logical Constants; Elementary Propositions and Extensionality; Elementary Propositions, Facts and Objects; Language and the World. Part 5 The Picture Theory of Propositions: Some Features of Ordinary Language; Models, Pictures and Logical Pictures; Logical Pictures; Digression - Frege and Wittgenstein on Determinacy of Sense; Propositions as Logical Pictures; The Tractarian Doctrine of Names; Ordinary Language as Essentially Pictorial. Part 6 Showing and Saying: Russell's Theory of Logical Types and Levels of Language; Showing, Saying and the Picture Theory of Propositions; Necessity, Tautology and Logical Propositions; Logic and the Nature of Philosophy. Part 7 The Principles of Mechanics: Mach and Sensationalism; Hertz and the Principles of Mechanics; Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Science. Part 8 Propositional Attitudes and the Empirical Ego: The Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement; Neutral Monism and the Behaviouristic Analysis; A Wittgensteinian Critique of Russell's Theories of Judgement; Wittgenstein's Theory of Propositional Attitudes. Part 9 Realism, Idealism and What Solipsism Intends: Solipsism; What Solipsism Intends - The Metaphysical Subject. Part 10 The Will, Ethics and "Das Mystische": The Will and Ethics; The Will and the World; Value and Scepticism; Action and Reward; God, the world, and the self.