Abstract
This paper begins from a reading of Wittgenstein’s pre-war dictations, his 1914–1916 notebooks, and his “Proto-Protractatus”, an early version of the Tractatus that Wittgenstein drafted during the first two years of the war. By starting from work of Wittgenstein’s that is more directly in dialogue with Russell’s pre-war work than the Tractatus, we can better appreciate what they had in common and where they disagreed.
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Notes
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In Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius Ray Monk gives an account of the Russell–Wittgenstein relationship during the pre-war years on which Wittgenstein’s ideas were already at a very mature stage during his later conversations with Russell. As Monk sums up his interpretation in his chapter titles, Wittgenstein was first Russell’s protégé, in 1912, and then his master, in 1913 (Monk 1990: Chaps. 3–4).
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Cf. Wittgenstein (2016: 5.5422): “The correct explanation of the form of the proposition ‘A judges p’ must show that it is impossible to judge a nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this condition.)”
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Researchers can consult Schmidt (2016) and Pilch (2016) for facsimiles and transcriptions of many of the key documents, and there is a wealth of information about the structure of MS 104 and its relationship to both Tractatus and Notebooks 1914–1916 in Geschkowski (2001). However, all this material is only available in German, and its overall structure is far from easy to take in.
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Stern, D.G. (2018). Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomisms. In: Elkind, L., Landini, G. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94364-0_5
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