Between Metaphysics and Nonsense: Elucidation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

It is a tribute to the fruitful ambiguity of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that there are currently at least two deeply opposed ways of reading it. On one reading, it is a work of metaphysics, which puts forward substantive claims about the nature of a language-independent reality. On this view, it provides a speculative account of what the relation between language and this independent reality must be in order for language to represent the world. I shall call this the metaphysical reading. The list of those who subscribe to this interpretation of the work includes most of its foremost interpreters: Ramsey, Russell, Black, Anscombe, Malcolm, Pears and Hacker. On the other reading, far from being a work of metaphysics, TLP represents the ‘unfolding of a therapeutic strategy’. This begins with the temptation to make metaphysical pronouncements from a philosophical perspective and ends with the realization that these pronouncements are nonsensical: the socalled philosophical perspective is an illusion. The upshot of this journey is The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No.  October  ISSN –