/lit/ - Literature

Why did Russell and Wittgenstein end up turning their backs on logical atomism? I thought Wittgenstein basically solved all philosophical problems in the Tractatus

>>8880689
>reddit now means "intelligent and reasonable" to /pol/tards

hmm...

>>8869576
>whereas the vast majority of the adult population does know what it's like to be in love.

Dubious

>>8700456
This is the finest literary community the planet has ever seen, why should I not spend ample time here

In its final form, then, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a curious hybrid of a book, a treatise on logic and the expression of a deeply mystical point of view. At the end of 1919, Bertrand Russell, who had not seen Wittgenstein for six years, spent a week in Holland with him in order to go through the Tractatus line by line. He was shocked at the transformation in his 'dream' student brought about by his experiences in the war. "I had felt in his book a flavour of mysticism," he wrote Ottoline Morrell, ". . . but was astonished when I found he has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk. It all started from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and grew (not unnaturally) during the winter he spent alone in Norway before the war, when he was nearly mad. Then during the war a curious thing happened. He went on duty to the town of Tarnov in Galicia, and happened to come upon a bookshop, which, however, seemed to contain nothing but picture postcards. However, he went inside and found that it contained just one book: Tolstoy on the Gospels. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times. But on the whole he likes Tolstoy less than Dostoevsky (especially Karamazov). He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn't agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking."

I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.