Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: the original authoritative edition

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

According to this view we could only say things about the world as a whole if we could get outside the world, if, that is to say, it ceased to be for us the whole world. Our world may be bounded for some superior being who can survey it from above, but for us, however finite it may be, it cannot have a boundary, since it has nothing outside it.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

The world is everything that is the case.

For if a thing is not distinguished by anything, I cannot distinguish it—for otherwise it would be distinguished.

To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world.

The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present.

The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now. We could only know them if causality were an inner necessity, like that of logical deduction.—The connexion of knowledge and what is known is that of logical necessity.

If from the fact that a proposition is obvious to us it does not follow that it is true, then obviousness is no justification for our belief in its truth.