What interests me most about the Tractatus is the question of how far one can get by taking the text at face value. I tend towards surface readings: resisting the temptation to read hidden doctrines or elaborate strategies into the text, and allowing for the possibility that some points were simply left underdeveloped or not fully thought through due to life circumstances.
Most of my published work on the Tractatus concerns a deceptively simple question: what do Wittgenstein’s numbers tell us about how the book is meant to be read? The numbering system is not merely a way of labelling remarks; it is meant to indicate relations between them. The dispute is about what kind of structure those relations form. On the tree reading, defended in varying versions by Luciano Bazzocchi, Peter Hacker, David Stern and others, the Tractatus has a two-dimensional, hierarchical structure in which remarks branch off from higher-level remarks. On the sequential reading, the printed order remains fundamental and the numbering helps to show how remarks at different levels are connected within that sequence.
I defend a version of the sequential reading that I call the sequential chain reading. On this view, the remarks form an intricately connected chain: the numbering indicates how remarks on different levels are linked so that readers can follow either the detailed sequence or only its main line of thought. The important question is therefore how Wittgenstein connects topics and claims with one another, rather than how the text can be divided into separate branches.
For a useful overview of the debate, see Stern 2023. I develop and defend the sequential chain reading in Kraft 2016. Bazzocchi discusses my account in Bazzocchi 2021, to which I reply in Kraft 2022; Bazzocchi responds in Bazzocchi 2022.
My papers
- “How to Read the Tractatus Sequentially.” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5(2) (2016), pp. 91–124. Journal Website · PhilPapers · PDF
- “Trees, Chains and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 77(4) (2022), pp. 746–754. DOI · PDF
References
- Luciano Bazzocchi, “The Tree-reading of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus and the Recent Debate on It.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 2 (2021), pp. 319–343. DOI
- Luciano Bazzocchi, “So what are the flaws of reading the Tractatus following the decimal tree?” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 77(4) (2022), pp. 755–759. DOI
- David G. Stern, “Tree-structured readings of the Tractatus.” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 11 (2023). DOI
Additional material
- “The Structure of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: Some Lists and Tables”.
- My blog posts on the Tractatus.
