Ludwig Wittgenstein | Footnotes to Plato | Wittgenstein's Relentless Honesty

If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree). But then, according to the Tractatus, in ethical thought, I am not representing how

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Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best ad

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So, philosophy, insofar as it is possible at all, cannot be a body of doctrines. It must be an activity. It must aim not, like science, at truth and knowledge, but only at clarity and, with the achievement of that clarity, peace. This is why Wittgenstein claims that the propositions of the Tractatus are like rungs on a ladder. We use them to climb

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