A Philosophical Study on the Object of Inquiry of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be divided into two main eras. They are the early period and the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico philosophicus has composed in the early period and Philosophical investigations have composed within the later period, which deals with the philosophy of language, mind and epistemology. Not only were the doctrines changed from early Wittgenstein’s thought to later Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the method was changed with the change of those doctrines. He combined logic and language in order to define the nature of the world. First, his aim was to understand the limitations of thoughts and through the limitations of thought, he wanted to understand the structures of language. The objective of this study is to identify the Object of Inquiry of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Textual analysis has been used as the method of this study. His philosophy was a critical explanation of language. He rejected that the structure of reality or the world could be determined the structures of language. He states that the structures of language could construct the world. He suggested that every language has its own logical structure. Wittgenstein’s early philosophy can be described from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The essence of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be summarized as following. A fact can be defined as a collection of atomic facts or states of affairs. Atomic facts can be defined as combinations of objects. Combinations of atomic facts can be defined as the world, there could be many re-combinations of those atomic facts, and it can be called as the change.