

James calls mystical experiences ineffable, which means that they cannot be expressed in ordinary language. The knowledge imparted by the vision seems to transcend philosophy, science and reason itself. You often feel a sense of blissful timelessness and oneness with everything (although the experience can also be hellish). These revelations are laden with spiritual significance and accompanied by intense emotions. In Varieties of Religious Experience, still the best scholarly treatment of mysticism, William James notes that during a mystical experience you feel as though you are encountering absolute truth, the ground of being, God. But in “The Mysticism of the Tractatus,” McGuiness uses the term to refer to an extraordinary form of perception described by sages east and west.

“Mysticism” is often used as a derogatory term to describe obscure, fuzzy thinking, or woo. First issued in German in 1921, Tractatus is a cryptic meditation on what is knowable and unknowable. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom Bertrand Russell described as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived,” published only one book during his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The salon consists of eight or so people, most with graduate degrees in philosophy, who gather in the salon-runner’s living room to jaw over a paper. I’ve been puzzling over these topics since my philosophy salon met to discuss “ The Mysticism of the Tractatus,” written in 1966 by B.F. It is accompanied by detailed notes, explaining key points of translation and interpretation, a glossary, chronology, and other editorial material designed to help the reader understand the Tractatus and its place in the history of philosophy.If you bring together two enigmas, do you get a bigger enigma, or do they cancel each other out, like multiplied negative numbers, to produce clarity? The latter, I hope, as I take on Wittgenstein and mysticism. Michael Beaney's translation is accompanied by two introductory essays, the first explaining the background to Wittgenstein's work, its main ideas and their subsequent development and influence, and some of the central debates, and the second providing an account of the history of the text and the two earlier translations. This new translation improves on the two main earlier translations, taking advantage of the scholarship over the last century that has deepened our understanding of both the Tractatus and Wittgenstein's philosophy more generally, scholarship that has also involved discussion of the difficulties in translating the original German text and the issues of interpretation that arise. It played a fundamental role in the development of analytic philosophy, and its philosophical ideas and implications have been fiercely debated ever since. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922, is one of the most influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century. 'what can be said at all can be said clearly and of what one cannot talk, about that one must be silent' Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.

#LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN SERIES#

Oxford Commentaries on International Law.
