Publication Details

Abstract

Based on the contents of the correspondence and an analysis of Der Gedanke and the Tractatus , and a comparison of the two, particularly in terms of the question What is fact? and What is the world?, we have attempted to provide a justification for the hypothesis that Frege’s essay Der Gedanke was conceived as a rival project to Wittgenstein’s nascent Tractatus. Our hypothesis explains Wittgenstein’s long-lasting animosity towards the contents of this particular treatise even decades after Frege’s death. We consider the key difference between the two projects to be the question of the explication of the concepts of fact and world. For Frege, the external world of sense-perceptible things (the World 1) is only the ground for objective facts, which are true thoughts that are composed exclusively of abstract entities. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, says that the world itself is the totality of facts which are special complexes.