Introduction

'The world is all that is the case.' This little book of under eighty pages consists of seven main propositions with layer upon layer of numbered sub-propositions, set out like a work of mathematics. Wittgenstein proposes the 'picture theory': the world consists of facts, a proposition is a logical picture of a fact, and it has meaning because it shares the logical form of the fact it depicts. This draws the limits of language, and so the limits of thought: what can be said at all can be said clearly, while the most important things, ethics, aesthetics, religion and the meaning of life, cannot be said, but only 'shown'. Whoever understands the book, he says, will recognise its propositions themselves as nonsensical, a ladder to be thrown away after one has climbed up it. Its last sentence reads: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' The book deeply influenced the Vienna Circle and the whole of analytic philosophy.