Abstract

In the hundred years since its publication, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has become a contemporary classic with the peculiarity that it is surrounded by an aura of mystery: what is really Wittgenstein’s aim in writing the Tractatus, how are we to understand the last two propositions of the Tractatus that enjoin us to detach ourselves from the book itself and keep silent, can the Tractatus be anything other than a positivist and anti-metaphysical treatise, and so on? Here we will argue that the answer to these questions must consider what the ethical meaning of the Tractatus might be and, closely related to that, what its importance is and that of the ineffable in general.