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Sachverhalt and Gegenstand are Dead

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

E. F. Thompkins
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Extract

Sachverhalt and Gegenstand are dead. Wittgenstein announces their passing in Philosophische Untersuchungen and he of all people should know when the brainchildren of his youth were no more. But it is surprising that he does not accord them more generous obsequies than a fragmented, offhand obituary. Their existence was a logical necessity in his erstwhile scheme of things, not a dispensable phenomenon of the contingent world:

Even if the world is infinitely complex, so that every fact consists of infinitely many Sachverhalte and every Sachverhalt is composed of infinitely many Gegenstände, even then there would have to be Gegenstände and Sachverhalte (T 4.2211)

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 66 , Issue 256 , April 1991 , pp. 217 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

1 This article is based on my reading of the German texts of Wittgenstein's Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung and Philosophische Untersuchungen and not on the published English translations. I identify references by means of Wittgenstein's section number preceded by PU for Philosophische Untersuchungen and T for the Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung which is now usually called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—Tractatus for short.

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