Is he worth reading?

Is he worth reading?

If you read him you can find out!

Of course - he's the greatest philosopher since Hegel

PI is good. Skip the Tractatus. Haven't read Blue and Brown Books yet.

Tractatus is required reading even if he himself refutes it - it's the stem of his whole thought process and important in its own right

Tractatus is pointless

t. took many classes on PI and all professors said ignore the Tractatus unless you have some special reason for caring about it

>t. took many classes on PI and all professors said ignore the Tractatus unless you have some special reason for caring about it

Your professors are the typical brainlets that don't understand Wittgenstein, read him for the first time at College and regurgitate old arguments about him.

this pretty much. Tractatus is useless if you want to sound cool around the academy. It's integral if you want to understand Wittgenstein- something that the academy doesn't have much interest in doing probably because it would entail actually talking about things that are tough to talk about.

My professor was Stanley Cavell kek

>My professor was Stanley Cavell kek

Stanley Cavell doesn't consider the Tractatus not worth reading. Fuck off, brainlet.

It is pointless to read if you are interested in Wittgenstein from anything like the perspective of the New Wittgenstein school. Saying it's useful for understanding his later work is like saying reading Frege and Russell is useful. I mean... sure, kind of? For historical, completionist reasons?

But guess what else the New Wittgensteinians say, when hundreds of students take one of their classes and think they will be learning an extension of traditional analytic logic, and that they need a good grounding in figures like Russell?
>No, absolutely not. Don't bother with that. Just start with the Philosophical Investigations. That stuff is interesting too, but the Wittgenstein we will be studying here is the late period Wittgenstein.

Exactly what they say about reading the Tractatus.

Your obsession with looking like you know what you're talking about (you don't) is going to drive people away before they even start, because they'll take one look at the Tractatus and say "fuck this." It's boring and awful and bears not at all on understanding his later work. You're just another shitposting dilettante telling people to decipher Linear A script and read Minoan tablets before they can start reading any subsequent philosophy.

Except isnt proposition 6.54 just as crucial to understanding Wittgenstein as any other found in PI?

>Your obsession with looking like you know what you're talking about (you don't) is going to drive people away before they even start, because they'll take one look at the Tractatus and say "fuck this." It's boring and awful and bears not at all on understanding his later work. You're just another shitposting dilettante telling people to decipher Linear A script and read Minoan tablets before they can start reading any subsequent philosophy.

Your reasoning is that of a moron's because "MUH PROFESSOR TOLD ME NOT TO READ IT". Your professor is a brainlet and I don't agree with the New Wittgenstein """"""school""""" nor do I hold Russell in high regard. Reading Frege and Russell is important otherwise how would you understand the arguments against them, brainlet?

I don't have an obsession with looking like I know what I'm talking about but you *seem* to, buddy, seeing as you boast about having studied under Cavell, another charlatan that founded a career under Wittgensteinian scholarship and following his advice to the letter instead of thinking for yourself.

Another brainlet of so-called """""Academia"""""

The ladder thing?

I'm glad to have triggered your most recent embarrassing meltdown you spastic faggot.

>I'm glad to have triggered your most recent embarrassing meltdown you spastic faggot.

Upset that I shattered your academic worldview, brainlet? All that debt was worth it, buddy!

the resolute reading issue
>Cavell, another charlatan that founded a career under Wittgensteinian scholarship and following his advice to the letter instead of thinking for yourself.

Confirmed for never having read Cavell

>Confirmed for never having read Cavell

Brainlet thinks criticising Cavell equates to not reading him. Keep posting Veeky Forums memes, buddy!

Even if he wasn't "good", he's influential enough that you can't claim to have a modern understanding of philosophy without a basic understanding of his works.

Ditch Tractatus and go straight into Philosophical Investigations. It might be interesting to read Philosophical Grammar, though. It's this sort of in-between work that was written for bureaucratic reasons but contains some early insights on language and mathematics.

Anyone who tells you it's absolutely pivotal to read the Tractatus is lying and has no understanding of the current scholarship.

>he thinks he's criticized Cavell

very cute, very very cute

>of the current scholarship.

wew

No matter, he'll be dead soon.

>plebeians too simple minded to understand that Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the greatest 20th century work of epic poetry

>Of course - he's the greatest philosopher since Hegel

Hegel was not a philosopher, neither was Wittgenstein. They were both merely intellectuals (sophists).

People in this thread are arguing and discussing about whether to read the tractatus. Some are for, some against, and the question has also turned into a pissing match. I cheerfully join in the pissing match. Consider the following:

The tractatus is a very short, 75-page treatise which is repeatedly referred to in PI. No academic worth their salt discourages a student from reading and engaging with a very short (if relatively difficult by normie standards) text which bears historical and contextual importance to the text that the professor is teaching, or to which the professor refers. Even if the professor is concerned that an unprepared student may somehow get things mixed up or use one text to mis-read the other, the professor worth their salt will still /not/ say: "don't read that" if the student show interest, but /should/ instead say something along the lines of "okay fine read that but take it with xyz grains of salt and understand when it was written and how it stands in relation to this other thing we've been talking about."

No one in this thread can offer a meaningful rebuttal of the above. Notice that I didn't even address the question of the intrinsic quality of the Tractatus itself—the point is that /no good academic outright discourages you from reading a short book which is related to your area of study/.

/thread

What's the point of reading this dense 75 page book without immersing yourself in the intellectual milieu of the early XXth century? Of course you can move your eyes across strings of words in the TLP and say you've "read it". But the truth is, and this is what people who discourage OP from reading it want to say, is that it's not relevant to do all of the background reading one needs to do in order to start "getting" the Tractatus.

Only intelligent post in this thread

it's really not that bad. It'll take some prereqs for sure but it's not like Hegel or anything

Just admit you didn't get it.

Did you know that Wittgenstein committed suicide? He was a brave man. I mean it took a lot of intellectual masturbation for him to finally "get there" but if he could do it, so could...

>it's really not that bad.

Wittgenstein scholars have created major "camps" of Tractatus interpretation because none of them can come to a fucking consensus on its nature and meaning

The tractatus is just a book for math enthusiasts and autistic guys
Prove me wrong

How many autodidact threads have you started to stave off the resentment bud? Has it ever worked?

Wow, a bunch of (((academics))) did exactly what Wittgenstein warned against (creating schools of thought/interpretation). Who would have thought!

I concede this point on the sole condition of the removal of the word "just" from its language.

Fuck off Schopenhauer

Only Plato is more fun to read than Wittgenstein.

I have a volume of his works that includes the Blue and Brown books, but not Philosophical Investigations. Do I still need to read PI, after reading the B&B?

Read PI, then On Certainty, then any of Blue/Brown / RFM / Zettel etc.

>captcha: select all ladders

I read all his works in one sitting and im a picky asshat.

I thought the tractucus was just wittgenstein thinking all language games were the 'create an image in someone elses mind' game, and then the PI is like "wait actually there's hundreds of different games, picture in mind is just one of many"

but I haven't read either book

No but Frank Ramsey is. Frank Ramsey is the intellect that refined wittgensteins work. Too bad he died so young, otherwise he would be the name we remember.

You could just skip him, read some modern linguistics, philosophers who built upon him, and so on.

>the point is that /no good academic outright discourages you from reading a short book which is related to your area of study/.
That is if you're studying wittgenstein. However, I read PI not for a course relating to philosophy, but instead due to reference made to it in a book on formal semantics. In this case it would be a waste of my time to read the Tractatus, despite its short length, because it serves no purpose in my general study of linguistics.