World and Form. Hermeneutic Notes on Wittgenstein's So-Called Realism

This paper analyses the concept of world and its relationship to the concept of form in the Tractatus. The aim of this analysis is to ask whether the relationship between world and form can tell us anything about the question that Brian McGuinness, in his 1981 essay, called “the So-called Realism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”. The paper first considers the semantic link between world and totality and the necessary link between world and logic. Finally, it is argued that Wittgenstein suspends the question of realism as a cognitive-theoretical thesis and shows in the last propositions of the Tractatus and in Lecture on Ethics that the world’s being is an ethical question.