Sense and Value in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

The book interprets Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, focusing on language, logic, and the sense of propositions, then examines its ethical and value-oriented themes. It analyzes the work's concluding remarks on ethics, situating them within its scientific worldview and highlighting parallels with authors Wittgenstein read and admired, presenting an enduring conception of the ethical.The study is organised into two interrelated parts. The first part examines the problem of the sense of propositions, which the Tractatus seeks to resolve, and explores the principal notions and arguments Wittgenstein develops regarding language, logic, and the structure of reality. This section situates Wittgenstein's conception of logic in contrast with the approaches of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. While Frege and Russell emphasised logic as a formal system capable of representing mathematical truths and propositions in precise symbolic terms, Wittgenstein frames logic as the scaffolding of the world, a reflection of reality's structure, and the medium through which meaningful statements can be made. The first part thus lays the groundwork for understanding how Wittgenstein's early philosophy intertwines linguistic analysis with metaphysical concerns.The second part turns to the problem of ethics and value. Here, the project investigates the ethical perspective implicit in the Tractatus's concluding remarks. It presents a detailed analysis of the main notions that underlie Wittgenstein's treatment of value, such as the absolute conception of the ethical, the notions of moral reward/punishment, the notion of the metaphysical subject as the limit of the world, the inexpressibility of morality thus conceived and ultimately the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. The study contextualizes these ideas by drawing parallels with authors whom Wittgenstein admired or engaged with, including Otto Weininger, Leo Tolstoy, and Immanuel Kant. Through this comparative approach, the project highlights how Wittgenstein's remarks on ethics, while brief and often aphoristic, resonate with enduring philosophical concerns regarding moral law, personal responsibility, and the transcendence of value.Overall, the project offers an exegesis of the Tractatus's ethical themes, showing how they relate to the scientific conception of the world presented in its main body. It interprets Wittgenstein's concluding ethical statements as a rearticulation of an older conception of the ethical, transformed by his distinctive logical and linguistic framework. By situating these reflections alongside both the analytic tradition and philosophical literature on morality, the study provides a nuanced account of the interplay between sense, logic, and value in Wittgenstein's early thought.