Companion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus
by Max Black

This is an excellent source for exploring the Tractatus in depth. Black offers a wealth of insights as, for example, the following quotations and remarks:

p. 2 "Don't worry about what you have already written. Just keep on beginning to think afresh as if nothing at all had happened yet" (Notebooks, 30 (6)).

p. 3 "The baldest summary of Wittgenstein's conception might run as follows: Reality (`the world') is a mosaic of independent items - the `atomic facts'; each of these is like a chain in which `objects' (logical simples) `hang in one another'; the objects are connected in a network of logical possibilities (`logical space'); the simplest `elementary' propositions are pictures of atomic facts, themselves facts in which names are concatenated, and all other propositions are truth-functions of the elementary ones; language is the great mirror in which the logical network is reflected, `shown', manifested. If we add the notions of names deputizing for objects, of logical propositions as limiting cases of contingent propositions, and the pervasive notions of logical form and of essence, we shall have a serviceable list of Wittgenstein's chief leitmotifs."

p. 7 "It was one of Wittgenstein's distinctive innovations to consider thoughts only as embodied in what he calls the `significant proposition' and so to transform the question of the relation of thought to reality...into the more promising question of the relation of language to reality."

My thoughts on page 11 - would "logical space" be something very like Plato's world of ideas?

In short, this is a book that serves as a useful and constant companion to the Tractatus. It would certainly be best to read the Tractatus first, perhaps in conjunction with a reading of Monks' book on Wittgenstein, but then the companion certainly functions in magnificent ways to expand an understanding of the Tractatus.