History of Mathematics

History of Mathematics

Presentation on Wittgenstein
Here's Monty Python's Philosopher Song.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus is available online.
Everything in the presentation was new to me, so I'll just give you my first impression. Wittgenstein starts as follows:
  1. The world is everything that is the case.
    1. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
    2. The world divides into facts.
What we can see here is the same problem that Euclid had when he wanted to define a point: in any axiomatic structure, there are notions that we have to keep undefined. Wittgenstein's definition of the world is much more hopeless than Euclid's definition of a point as something that has no part. Wittgenstein does not say what `is the case', `fact', `thing' is.