You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Malin Hay.

Ludwig Wittgenstein published only one book of philosophy during his

lifetime, the tractatus logico-philosophagus, an austere, highly structured exploration of language

and its limits, of the relationship between facts and objects, and of what exactly we mean when we

refer to the world. Vittgenstein died in 1951, and in 2021, the tractators

came out of copyright, leading to a sudden rush towards new translations. Joining me this week is

the philosopher and broadcaster Adrian Moore, Professor of Philosophy, at St Hughes College Oxford.

He has been writing philosophy pieces for the LRB since 2003, and his piece about the

tractatus can be found in the most recent issue. Adrian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast

today. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to join you. So let's start by

talking a little bit about the tractatus itself, because the circumstances under which it came to

be published are quite unusual and so is

its format. Could you tell us a little bit about how Wittgenstein, who was initially training as

an engineer in Berlin and Manchester, became a philosopher and how he wrote and published

the tractatus? Yes, he was training as an engineer, but he became very self-conscious about what he was doing,

and in particular, it wasn't long before, he was very interested in some fundamental issues

about the nature of mathematics. Engineering obviously makes critical use of mathematics,

and Wittgenstein was interested in what it was that he was making use

of, and in the way in which mathematical language works. And this in turn pretty quickly became an

obsession with the nature of language more generally. There were some very fundamental philosophical issues

about the character of language, which, as I say, pretty much became an obsession for Wittgenstein,

partly just because of their own intrinsic interest, but partly because of how in their own way

...