An ambitious, rich, and challenging work, Eli Friedlander’s Signs of Sense attempts to trace the path of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, from the world, to its threatened loss by way of failed and ultimately nonsensical efforts to account for our relation to it, to its recovery as a significant whole, a meaningful habitation for human beings, in the uses we make of everyday language. Aiming to account for nothing less than the purpose of the Tractatus, its overall effects on its r…
Read moreAn ambitious, rich, and challenging work, Eli Friedlander’s Signs of Sense attempts to trace the path of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, from the world, to its threatened loss by way of failed and ultimately nonsensical efforts to account for our relation to it, to its recovery as a significant whole, a meaningful habitation for human beings, in the uses we make of everyday language. Aiming to account for nothing less than the purpose of the Tractatus, its overall effects on its readers, Friedlander has provocative things to say about two centrally important issues—the role of the nonsense that the Tractatus itself produces and the relation between the ostensibly logical and ethical facets of Wittgenstein’s text. Part 1 works through the text of the Tractatus more or less in order and in relative isolation from interpretative controversy. Here Friedlander lays out the ontological distinctions that occupy Wittgenstein at the outset; examines the identity of form between language and world that makes representation possible; deepens our understanding of Wittgenstein’s “fundamental idea … that ‘logical constants’ are not representatives”; proposes an original reading of the Tractarian treatment of solipsism and the sense in which “what the solipsist means is quite correct”; and finally, tries to demonstrate the ethical significance of the movement of the Tractatus as a whole and its culmination in apparent self-annihilation. Part 2 helps to fix our understanding of the intricate and subtle reading offered in part 1: chapter 11, by situating it with respect to major interpretative issues, and chapter 12, by giving an interesting account of Wittgenstein’s initial moves away from the Tractatus in the 1929 “Remarks on Logical Form.”