Nikolay Milkov

Recently, Michael Friedman has claimed that virtually all the seeds of Hempel’s philosophical development trace back to his early encounter with the Vienna Circle (Friedman 2003, 94). As opposed, however, to Friedman’s view of the principal early influences on Hempel, we shall see that those formative influences originated rather with the Berlin Group. Hempel, it is true, spent the fall term of 1929 as a student at the University of Vienna, and, thanks to a letter of recommendation from Hans Reichenbach, he even attended some sessions of the Vienna Circle. But he spent much less time in Vienna than in Berlin, where he studied under Reichenbach from 1926 till 1933 and wrote a dissertation on probability, Reichenbach’s specialty. Hempel also attended seminars conducted by Walter Dubislav, another member of the Berlin Group.

This paper introduces a novel interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, a work widely held to be one of the most intricate in the philosophical canon. We understand the Tractatus not as the development of a theory but as the advancement of a new logical symbolism (a new instrument) that enables one to “recognize the formal properties [the logic] of propositions by mere inspection of propositions themselves” (6.122). Moreover, the Tractarian conceptual notation stands to instruct us in a better way to follow the logic of language, and by that token, enhances our ability to think. Upon acquiring the thinking skills that one can develop by working with this symbolism, one can “throw away [this] ladder” (6.54), as it were, and move on.