Word: tractatus
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...mathematical logic, and rushed to Cambridge to become the protege of Bertrand Russell, whose monumental Principia Mathematica (1913), written with Alfred North Whitehead, was an attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic. Wittgenstein's first book, published in England in 1922, the even more grandly titled Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, went even further, and was thought by him, and by some of his admirers, to have brought philosophy to an end, its key problems definitively solved once and for all. Some "philosophical" propositions could be readily expressed and evaluated within his system, and those that couldn't--among them, metaphysical riddles...
...then along came Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus redefined and reduced the scope of the discipline. Says Martin: "As I studied the history of philosophy, the quest for ultimate truth became less important to me, and by the time I got to Wittgenstein it seemed pointless. Then I realized that in the arts you don't have to discover meaning, you create it. There are no rules, no true and false, no right and wrong. Anyway, these were the musings of a 21-year-old kid." A 21-year-old kid who was ready...
...skepticism also leaves the author unmoved. A British journalist and former editor of the New Statesman, Johnson seems to have had a bellyful of bland uncertainty. Besides, the feverish riddles of Ezekiel and the prophetic agonies of Job make better copy than the Tractatus of Spinoza. Johnson singles out the 17th century philosopher as the sort of non-Jewish Jew who sacrifices the soul of rationalism to cold logic. He quotes Soviet Writer Isaac Babel's self-mocking definition of a Jewish intellectual ("a man with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart") and brands Marx and Freud...
...reality and the question of whether language clouds rather than defines what is actual. To the question, "What is your aim in philosophy?", he answered, "To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle." He was the fly, and words the sticky trap. In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he used a rigorous logic to enclose the boundaries of language. What lay outside, he concluded, was a reality that could not be named, let alone explained. He became the patron saint of logical positivism, that dry, scrupulous wing of modern philosophy most concerned with linguistics, most scornful...
...himself with art works of his friends, from Marcel Duchamp's Dada gimcracks to Andy Warhol's soup boxes, which he uses in lieu of extra furniture. He is a chess player and keeps a library substantial in such stiff favorite reading as Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logicos Philosophi-cus. Johns also keeps on hand an inexhaustible supply of beer, which, in a way, has crept into his work...