5/20/2023 0 Comments The broom of the systemHe wrote to Olsen that at first he found Philosophical Investigations, the crowning statement of the late philosophy, to be “silly.” Along with its controversial arguments about the nature and limits of language, the Tractatus introduced some indisputable formal innovations, including a method of analyzing the propositions of modern logic by way of “truth tables.” To some, the book might have seemed forbiddingly spare and exacting Wallace remembered being moved by its “cold formal beauty.” When the seminar moved on to Wittgenstein’s so-called late philosophy, in which he repudiates the ideas and austere methodology of the Tractatus in favor of new assumptions and a looser, less mathematical style, Wallace was not immediately impressed. As Wallace recollected in 1992 in a letter to the novelist Lance Olsen, he was “deeply taken” in the seminar with Wittgenstein’s first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). One semester, he took a seminar on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work grapples with the writings of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, two of the founders of modern logic. For most of college, Wallace’s main philosophical interests were in the more technical branches of the subject, such as mathematical logic and the philosophy of language.
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