Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosopicus (to give the book its full ponderous Latin title) had at last brought together the two halves of Aristotle’s living legacy—his logic and his empirical science—and shown that they are inseparable, indeed that they define our world. Because “what we cannot speak about,” Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus’s last sentence, meaning what can’t be verified by empirical observation, “we must pass over in silence.” Three thousand years of fuzzy thinking and foggy logic, from Parmenides’s problem of Being to Hegel’s dialectic and Nietzsche’s Eternal
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