I have to do an 8 page essay about the tractatus and I have no

Point ot how the entire treatise falls apart in the sixth proposition, where Wittgenstein combines his scientific ignorance and personal arrogance to make a crapload of leaps in logic

I was a philosophy major and I'm very glad I never had to do this

>>9473352

If I were in your position anon, I would write a piece which demonstrates (by explaining, even to the point of teaching, a bit) a competency in the mathematical notation used by Wittgenstein, and how it is used to build up the two-valued logic, truth functions etc that we today take for granted. I would also make a point of spending a paragraph or three acknowledging the importance of this sort of logic to computer science, and also the simple fact that other people were writing truth tables and building mathematical logic around the same time.

Later, although the above would be the focus of my piece (hint: if you devote lines to reproducing formulae in a nicely formatted way, this might be a nice way to pad your paper a bit), I would also spend a little time acknowledging the later "mystical" shift of the Tractatus, and simply that there is a "later Wittgenstein" who later found fault with this work. HINT: after saying a little bit, and acknowledging what I do not know, or understand and making some otherwise reasonable statements, I would invoke 7. If you do the same at some point without being too cute about it, the professor might like that if they have a sense of humor. It's up to you to gauge the temperament of your professor.

Another possibility for you, OP, would be to investigate the matter of how Wittgenstein hated Russell's introduction. You could then write a historical piece about this, but you would need to take care to couch same in discussion of the text proper, always coming back to the text.

Something else which has stuck out to me (some more autistic, detail-considerations, and thus right at home with analytic philosophy) is the simple fact that Wittgenstein's numbering scheme is inconsistent in a particular way. There are (about) 15 "implied" statements such as 2.0, and (IIRC) 2.20, etc, things with ending zeroes, which are implied in the comment structure but which are not actually part of the text. Furthermore, despite the comment structure leading to tantalizing internet projects to "graph" the tractatus, I have found all of these wanting in some way or another: In particular, nobody seems to reproduce the /figures/ which are present in certain of the statements, as part of their treatment. In particular, Wittgenstein in 6.1203 uses a rather clumsy "bracket" notation to basically express truth-functional informatoin which we would today express in terms of neater truth tables. I have yet to see these figures reproduced in an online edition.

>>9473352
There are other ways to bait lit

>>9473492

BIG HINT ALONG THESE LINES: 4.27 and 4.42 use closely related finite sums which despite looking rather complicated to a non-STEM person, are simply fancy expressions for powers of 2. You can equate this expression with the powers of 2, and explain this to a reader, by learning about the choose function (combinations) and above all PASCAL'S TRIANGLE.

The fact that at these points, Wittgenstein does not expressly equate these things with powers of 2 gives a college essayist good, valid material for discussion and explication.

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>>9473492
thanks, that helps a lot. I am no philosophy major or anything so the tractatus is quite complicated to read and understand, I think this assignment is way to hard for an elective course.

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>>9473352

I feel the same way about Division Two Heidegger, who I also have to write a paper on, and I have no idea how to begin it without saying "fuck it, Heidegger needs to go back to the drawing board". I realized that during his chapter on death and the ontological relation to it, death doesn't mean what I thought it meant (or the way SEP viewed it). In fact, it means something mind-blowing, but the eventual conclusion is a total performs a total bait and switch.

Heidegger starts talking about how we have to look to the timespan of Dasein, and not just its momentary Being, to understand the whole of it and what it really means to "be". This means looking to the "end" and Dasein's relationship to this inevitable, but unpredictable, event, which he flirts with to mean death, which becomes a problem because nobody can really experience their own death. Pretty soon, however, he starts making random distinctions like perishing, demise, and death, so now we're describing a relation to something other than the death we thought we were talking about, which isn't really "the final end" like losing your life, but rather "the end" of meaning in a particular world. Having an authentic relationship to death means recognizing the groundless grounding of all meaning and coming to own the possibility of having no possibilities.

It fucking blew my mind because I have no idea if I ever understood Division Two of Heidegger because I don't understand if there's some sort of superstructure Dasein that is born, killed, and rebirthed throughout life, or the fact that now we have a "death" that can be... experienced... to some extent... meaning that we never really had a problem in the first place of determining an ontological relation to death because the possibility of no more possibilities can be experienced.

Honestly, I'm bummed out that there's all of these contradictions and depth to Heidegger that I've missed out on, and I have no way to reconcile it without barfing a terrible paper because there's no way I'm going to reread all of B&T in a weekend.

>>9473541

Also I was supposed to turn in this paper yesterday. RIP me.

>>9473545
Not OP

>>9473552

Never claimed to be OP?

>>9473541
Talk about the Socratic Death and Orphic rebirth rites tracing back to Egyptian hierophanies.

>>9473541
>>9473794
Or just talk about psychedelic ego death and hope your teacher is a hippie.

You can also argue that Wittgenstein is an autistic sophist whose non-philosophy has created malevolent thinking machines which compute our biases into the death drive.

>>9473819
thnx

>>9473495
I wish i was trying to bait

>>9473352
1-4 Pages long? Feminist Critique of ____

5-9 Pages long? Marxist Critique of ______