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Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the greatest and most fascinating philosophers of all time. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, composed in a series of remarkable numbered propositions, was the only book he published in his lifetime. He tackles nothing less than the question of whether there is such a thing as a logically perfect language and, armed with it, what we can say about the nature of the world itself. Pushing the limits of language, logic and philosophy, the Tractatus is a brilliant, cryptic and hypnotic tour de force, exerting a major impact on twentieth-century philosophy and stir

Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme brilliance, it captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. For Wittgenstein, logic was something we use to conquer a reality which is in itself both elusive and unobtainable. He famously summarized the book in the following words: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the greatest and most fascinating philosophers of all time. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, composed in a series of remarkable numbered propositions, was the only book he published in his lifetime. He tackles nothing less than the question of whether there is such a thing as a logically perfect language and, armed with it, what we can say about the nature of the world itself. Pushing the limits of language, logic and philosophy, the Tractatus is a brilliant, cryptic and hypnotic tour de force, exerting a major impact on twentieth-century philosophy and stirring the imagination today. With a new foreword by Ray Monk.

Perhaps the most important work of philosophy written in the twentieth century, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme brilliance, it captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. For Wittgenstein, logic was something we use to conquer a reality which is in itself both elusive and unobtainable. He famously summarized the book in the following words: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.' David Pears and Brian McGuinness received the highest praise for their meticulous translation. The work is prefaced by Bertrand Russell's original introduction to the first English edition

This renewed edition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, exactly a century after Wittgenstein's release, presents the text in a hierarchical manner. That tree-like reading is recommended by Wittgenstein himself in the sole footnote of his book, in which he suggests that the inner logical structure of the text is set by the decimal numbers of its propositions. Indeed, the compact and intricate sequence of the traditional presentation is only a rigorous logical bet, but only a logical machine or a robot can unravel the tangle.In the present disposition, instead, all horizontal and vertical references become directly manifest and any reader can enjoy the fine architecture and the elegant reasoning of Wittgenstein's work. Every page is an actual reading unit, perfectly coherent and complete. The Tractatus becomes comprehensible also to unskilled readers, of course at more or less deep levels, while a scholar or a more practised reader can detect suggestions and meanings that had remained, until now, completely hidden. A historical note shows in which manner the new structural perspective sheds new light also in the compositional manuscript we have, which 'writing units' are very similar, actually, to the pages of the present edition. Printing the Tractatus following Wittgenstein's decimal prescriptions required meticulous philological care and some discretional conventions: for instance, at the top of each page the commented-upon proposition is printed again, to make the sight complete and self-sufficient. Also, the famous and intriguing picture of the eye and its visual field (5.6331) has been restored as Wittgenstein drafted it, making the entire page perfectly understandable and coherent. This documented and editorial work on one of the most referenced books of the last century was conceived to obtain, and in fact gained, a perspicuous and crystal clear text, philologically faithful and relaxingly readable at the same time.