Wittgenstein’s Pre-Tractatus Conception of Philosophy: From the Originally Assumed View of the Task of Philosophy to the Symbolic Turn and Isomorphism

In a remark of the Notebooks 1914–1916, Wittgenstein addresses the issue of the task of philosophy and writes that: “(…) if everything that needs to be shewn is shewn through the existence of subject-predicate SENTENCES, then the task of philosophy is a different one than what I originally assumed” (NB, 3(1)). In this chapter I propose a reconstruction of what Wittgenstein originally assumed regarding the task of philosophy and I argue that Wittgenstein’s early conception of philosophy gradually emerged from his efforts to deal with the defects of this originally assumed conception of philosophy’s task.