I first read the Tractatus around 1996 while still in high school and have lost count of how many times I have read or taught it since. It is certainly among the top ten philosophical texts that have influenced me. Thus far, I have published mostly on one issue about the Tractatus: Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic use of numbered remarks to reveal something about the book’s structure to his readers. 

The numbering system of the Tractatus has recently been interpreted in two fundamentally opposed ways, the so-called sequential and tree readings. Broadly speaking, the sequential reading thinks of the Tractatus as a linear text, in which different remarks receive varying degrees of emphasis depending on their number. By contrast, the tree reading (as defended by Pater Hacker, Luciano Bazzocchi and others) interprets the work as a hypertext, where cardinal remarks function as nodes branching out to subsidiary remarks, thereby revealing a hierarchical structure.

In my work, I defend the sequential reading or, more precisely, a particular variant of it I call the chain reading. Although the sequential reading is often treated as the standard or default interpretation of the Tractatus’ numbering system, it is striking how rarely it is explicitly defended. In fact, to my knowledge, the only papers that systematically defend it are my own. My 2016 paper explains and argues for the chain reading as an alternative to the tree reading, while my 2023 paper is a reply to Luciano Bazzocchi’s critique of my work.

A useful introduction to the debate about the numbering system is David Stern’s “Tree-structured Readings of the Tractatus” (Nordic Wittgenstein Review 11, 2022/23).

My papers

• Kraft, Tim (2016)
• Kraft, Tim (2023)
• See also: My blog posts on the Tractatus