tractatus

Tractatus is a Latin noun meaning a treatise or tract. In scholarly usage, it is used as the title of various short scholarly works across disciplines, often in philosophy, theology, or science.

The best-known modern tractatus is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and later translated into English. The work presents a compact, highly structured argument aiming to delimit what can be said meaningfully and to reveal the limits of language and thought. It is influential in analytic philosophy and helped shape the early ideas of the Vienna Circle.

Key ideas in the Tractatus include a picture theory of language: sentences are pictures of possible states of affairs in the world, and the structure of language mirrors the structure of reality. The world, for Wittgenstein, is the totality of facts rather than things, and logic is the form that underlies all facts. Language, to be meaningful, must correspond to this logical structure; much of traditional philosophy, he argues, is confused by misapprehending language. The book is written in a unique, numbered format, with seven main propositions and subordinate remarks, and it maintains that philosophy should aim to clarify, not to advocate theories.

The closing claim, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” is widely cited and signals the view that many realms—ethics, aesthetics, and spirituality—lie beyond propositional language. The Tractatus significantly influenced 20th-century philosophy, especially discussions of logic, language, and the limits of what can be expressed.