Abstract

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus famously ends with a remark that, as he says in the book’s “Preface,” could also summarize the sense of the book as a whole: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Passing over, for the moment, the difference between speaking and knowing, the remark can be read almost as a paraphrase of one written almost 2500 years ago: You could not know what is not – that cannot be done – nor indicate it. (KR 291).