page_title: Ludwig Wittgenstein
section_title: Work on Logik
hierarchical_section_title: Ludwig Wittgenstein / 1913–1920: World War I and the Tractatus / Work on Logik
caption_attribution_description: English: Entries from October 1914 in Ludwig Wittgenstein's diaries (published in English translation as Notebooks 1914-1916. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Blackwell, Oxford 1961). Photo from private archives, made by a. ziel in 2006, in Wren Library, Cambridge.
context_page_description: Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
  From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. During his lifetime he published just one slim book, one article, one book review and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations. His teacher, Bertrand Russell, described Wittgenstein as
  "perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".
  Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a fortune from his father in 1913. He initially made some donations to artists and writers, and then, in a period of severe personal depression after the First World War, he gave away his entire fortune to his brothers and sisters. Three of his four brothers committed suicide, which Wittgenstein had also contemplated.
context_section_description: Karl Wittgenstein died on 20 January 1913, and after receiving his inheritance Wittgenstein became one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He donated some of his money, at first anonymously, to Austrian artists and writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. Trakl requested to meet his benefactor but in 1914 when Wittgenstein went to visit, Trakl had killed himself.  Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by other academics, and so in 1913 he retreated to the village of Skjolden in Norway, where he rented the second floor of a house for the winter. He later saw this as one of the most productive periods of his life, writing Logik (Notes on Logic), the predecessor of much of the Tractatus. While in Norway, Wittgenstein learned Norwegian to converse with the local villagers, and Danish to read the works of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He adored the “quiet seriousness” of the landscape but even Skjolden became too busy for him. He soon designed a small wooden house which was erected on a remote rock overlooking the Eidsvatnet Lake just outside the village. The place was called “Østerrike” (Austria) by locals. He lived there during various periods until the 1930s; substantial parts of his works were written here. (The house was broken up in 1958 to be rebuilt in the village. A local foundation collected donations and bought it in 2014; it was dismantled again and re-erected at its original location; the inauguration took place on 20 June 2019 under international attendance.)
  It was during this time that Wittgenstein began addressing what he considered to be a central issue in Notes on Logic, a general decision procedure for determining the truth value of logical propositions which would stem from a single primitive proposition. He became convinced during this time that “[a]ll the propositions of logic are generalizations of tautologies and all generalizations of tautologies are generalizations of logic. There are no other logical propositions.” Based on this, Wittgenstein argued that propositions of logic express their truth or falsehood in the sign itself, and one need not know anything about the constituent parts of the proposition to determine it true or false. Rather, one simply need identify the statement as a tautology (true), a contradiction (false), or neither.
  The problem lay in forming a primitive proposition which encompassed this and would act as the basis for all of logic. As he stated in correspondence with Russell in late 1913, “The big question now is, how must a system of signs be constituted in order to make every tautology recognizable as such IN ONE AND THE SAME WAY? This is the fundamental problem of logic!”  The importance Wittgenstein placed upon this fundamental problem was so great that he believed if he did not solve it, he had no reason or right to live. Despite this apparent life-or-death importance, Wittgenstein had given up on this primitive proposition by the time of the writing of the Tractatus. The Tractatus does not offer any general process for identifying propositions as tautologies; in a simpler manner, “Every tautology itself shows that it is a tautology.” This shift to understanding tautologies through mere identification or recognition occurred in 1914 when Moore was called on by Wittgenstein to assist him in dictating his notes.
  At Wittgenstein's insistence, Moore, who was now a Cambridge don, visited him in Norway in 1914, reluctantly because Wittgenstein exhausted him. David Edmonds and John Eidinow write that Wittgenstein regarded Moore, an internationally known philosopher, as an example of how far someone could get in life with "absolutely no intelligence whatever." In Norway it was clear that Moore was expected to act as Wittgenstein's secretary, taking down his notes, with Wittgenstein falling into a rage when Moore got something wrong. When he returned to Cambridge, Moore asked the university to consider accepting Logik as sufficient for a bachelor's degree, but they refused, saying i
caption: Entries from October 1914 in Wittgenstein's diary, on display at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge
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