Marie McGinn provides a clear, comprehensive, and original interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and of its relation to Wittgenstein's later work. The Tractatus is one of the most famous works of early analytic philosophy, the interpretation of which has always been a matter for controversy and is currently the focus for an important philosophical debate.

Discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is currently dominated by two opposing interpretations of the work: a metaphysical or realist reading and the "resolute" reading of Diamond and Conant. Marie McGinn's principal aim in this book is to develop an alternative interpretative line, which rejects the idea; central to the metaphysical reading, that Wittgenstein sets out to ground the logic of our language in features of an independently constituted reality, but which allows that he aims to provide positive philosophical insights into how language functions.
McGinn takes as a...