Wittgenstein and Russell

This Element provides clear and concise explanations of the most important of these responses: Wittgenstein's criticisms of Russell's theories of judgment in the summer of 1913. These criticisms show that Russell's theories do not provide a coherent account of the truth and falsity of judgments without a satisfactory theory of propositions. They are of first-rate importance for Wittgenstein's early philosophical development, setting the path to the conceptions of proposition and of logic in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This Element details the steps of this philosophical development, in Wittgenstein's "Notes on Logic" and his wartime notebooks, culminating in the recognition of primitive notions of possibility and necessity as central to propositional representation and the nature of logic. It also touches on further aspects of Wittgenstein's responses to Russell after the Tractatus, in writings of the middle and later periods of Wittgenstein's philosophy.