2nd revised English edition, 2026
ISBN 978-3-567-02888-5

URL: https://klaus-niedermair.at/publikationen/978-3-567-02888-5.php

In the system of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus one focal point can be dis-cerned: the self-reference of language grounds both the possibility and the limits of language and philosophy. Language must be autarkic, i.e. implicitly self-referential: significant propositions are de-formalizations of possibilities of sense, and these are formalizations of significant propositions. But language cannot be explicitly self-referential: a language system that tries to represent its own possibilities of sense runs aground in infinite regress or paradox. Possibilities of sense cannot be said; they "show" themselves.

This first English edition leaves the book unchanged and adds two texts. An essay of 1990, "Language-Game, Language System, Language Ideal", carries the argu-ment forward to the Philosophical Investigations: once the assumption of a single universal language system is given up, a plurality of language-games takes its place, held open to one another by a language ideal. A new epilogue relates the book to the later debate between "resolute" and traditional readings of the Tracta-tus. It proposes a third path, which moves the problem of self-reference from the proposition to entire language systems and understands the language ideal, with Kant, as a regulative idea of openness, not an ideal language. The epilogue also considers what follows for a world of heterogeneous discourses, digital filter bub-bles and large language models.

Originally published in German as Wittgensteins Tractatus und die Selbstbezüglichkeit der Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987).