SAYING AND SHOWING: THE SINGLE SOLUTION OF ALL THE “PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY” ACCORDING TO WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS
SAYING AND SHOWING: THE SINGLE SOLUTION OF ALL THE “PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY” ACCORDING TO WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS

Summary/Abstract: In a famous letter to Russell, Wittgenstein asserts that the ‘main point’ of his Logish-philosophische Abhandlung lies in the demarcation between ‘what can be expressed [gesagt] by propositions’ and ‘what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown [gezeigt]’. Drawing correctly this distinction between saying and showing is indeed presented as the ‘cardinal problem’ of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. In fact, the author of the Tractatus seems to think that this prima facie enigmatic distinction provides us with the definitive ‘solution’ of every significant philosophical problem. Given the large variety of distinct matters the Treatise deals with, such an affirmation may sound extremely bold, and the careful reader must try to see if the book contains a definite idea of showing, or if ‘showing’ is, on the contrary, a mere name for an irreducible multiplicity of issues involving the limits of language. In this article, I try to sketch an elucidation of the form of the saying/ showing distinction in order to indicate that it can be understood as the development of a single way of apprehending the most decisive ‘problems of philosophy.’

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