Abstract

In this article, I analyze the place of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the history of analytic philosophy and, more generally, in the history of Western philosophy. After questioning and re-examining the meta-historical and metaphilosophical presuppositions of the former, I completely reformulate the very question of knowing what the place of this book is in the latter. The theory that is provocatively put forward (as concerns the established historiography) is that the focal problem in the Tractatus lies in the ultimate foundations of philosophy through logic, and that this desideratum takes up, in new terms, the modern conceptions regarding such foundations, from Descartes and Kant to Frege and Russell. Other fundamental theses advanced in this work should be understood from the perspective of this framework: that of the linguistic turn that it inaugurated; the thesis that places the theory of meaning at the heart of philosophical investigation; and principally, based on the idea that this investigation leads to the conception of the end of philosophy itself, the thesis that concludes in favor of mysticism.