‎"WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG.‎
‎Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. With an Introduction by Bertrand Russel. - [THE DEFINITIVE TEXT OF THE TRACTATUS]‎

‎Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1933. 8vo. Original full cloth with gilt spine. Capitals with light traces of use and corners very slightly bumped, otherwise very clean and fine. An overall excellent copy. Bookseller ettiquette to inside of front board (Ejnar Munksgaard). Note in pencil ""Schultzers eksemplar"" to first free flyleaf. Occasional light pencil annotations in the margins. 189, (3 - blank) pp. + (8) pp of publisher's advertisement (from 1944 - see note below).‎

Reference : 63635

‎The very rare second, corrected edition Wittgenstein's seminal ""Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"", with the famous preface by his Cambridge-teacher Bertrand Russel. Wittgenstein made the corrections himself and changed the text quite a bit in order to make it more clear and precise. This edition constitutes the final state of the text and is thus the first appearance of the definitive text of the Tractatus, the version used by almost all Wittgenstein scholars. The second edition was published in an edition of 1.000 copies. It did not sell well, though, and by 1944, the publisher still had many remainders. Thus, these were bound, as here, with publisher's advertisements from 1944. From Carl henrik Koch's library, before that, the library of Bent Schultzer (1904-1973) - Danish professor of philosophy. The work originally appeared under the title ""Logisch-Philosophische Abhandling"" in volume 14, part three of ""Annalen der Naturphilosophie"" in 1921, being the final year of the publication of the journal. In 1922 the work was issued in English with the original German as parallel-text. The Latinized translation of the title into ""Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"" is due to G.E. Moore. Indeed, the famous Cambridge-philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore may be considered the godfathers of this seminal work. After its first publication in German in 1921, the work instantly became immensely influential, both in England and Austria, the home-country of Wittgenstein, and when Russell published the second issue of his groundbreaking work, ""Principia Mathematica"", in 1925 (first issue: 1910-13), he revised certain notions in accordance with theories he had found in ""Tractatus"". The work also greatly influenced the Vienna Circle, consisting of persons such as Gödel, Neurath, Carnap, and Hahn, under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, the last being one of the publishers of the ""Tractatus"". They especially adapted his condemnation of metaphysics, his distinction between tautological sentences and non-tautological ones, which leads to the notion that the classical problems of philosophy are actually senseless, and that philosophy should essentially be the logical syntax of language. This combined with the notion that all sentences of the language are truth-functions of the elementary sentences makes ""Tractatus"" one of, if not the, main work(s) in the constitution of logical empiricism. The work was meant to put an end to (i.e. propose the solution to) all fundamental philosophical problems, which would obviously also come to mean the end of all philosophical production, which is why Wittgenstein left philosophy for a number of years and never came to publish another book. After having written ""Tractatus"", Wittgenstein lived in accordance with his theory of having solved the fundamental problems of philosophy, and he had nothing to do with the world of philosophy for several years. In 1929, however, he returned to Cambridge, where, with the help of Russell and Moore, he became Doctor due to ""Tractatus"" and was given a research fellowship at Trinity College. In 1939, he succeeded Moore as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. During the two last decades of his life, Wittgenstein developed a philosophy which was completely different from the one presented in ""Tractatus"". Due to the vast difference between his two philosophies and due to the fact that they have both been very influential, the first of them, represented by ""Tractatus"", is now called 'the early Wittgenstein', and the second 'the later Wittgenstein'.It is doubtful whether any other work has influenced 20th century philosophy to such an extent as ""Tractatus"", and one needs no hesitation to claim that no other work has had as great an impact on philosophy of language and mind as this one. To understand the philosophy of Wittgenstein is to understand the connection between philosophical problems and language, and to understand philosophy of language and mind, one must understand the ideas behind ""Tractatus"". Frongia and McGuinness (1990), p. 42. ‎