WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig.

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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. First edition in English, and the first in book form, of the culminating work of Wittgenstein's early period, his only philosophical book published in his lifetime. This edition, including a 17-page introduction by Bertrand Russell, was translated by Charles Kay Ogden and Frank Ramsey.The front pastedown is signed, in a contemporary hand, "James Smith, Trinity College, Cambridge". This may be the literary critic (1904-1972), a close friend and collaborator of F. R. Leavis, himself a friend and sometime sparring partner of Wittgenstein. The contents bear infrequent pencil annotations, presumably in Smith's hand, and the rear endpapers contain notes in the same hand. A portion of the original rear pastedown, with further notes, has been laid down on the renewed paper.The original German text had been published, with Russell's help, in the journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie in 1921. That publication - under the title Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung - was plagued with so many errors that Wittgenstein regarded it as a "pirated edition" (Monk, p. 205). He corrected the text for this edition, which prints the German parallel with the translation.The cornerstone text of logical positivism and the Cambridge school of analytic philosophy, the Tractatus articulates the relationship between language and reality and defines the limits of science.Low sales of those copies bound on publication meant that first edition sheets were subsequently bound up, as

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