Doing Logic with a Hammer: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Polemics of Logical Positivism

How does one start an avant-garde movement? First one needs a group of people ready to subsume their differences in the name of a common cause. Second, this cause must aspire to a fundamental, revolutionary change, a new departure, a utopian promise. And third, the new movement must be inaugurated in some form of public event and through the distribution of a collective statement, usually written anonymously, in the form of a manifesto. The genre of the manifesto crystallizes the most central features of early twentieth-century avant-gardism: utopian fervor, exaggerated claims, condensed slogans, a shrill tone, and demands for revolutionary action. Fuelled by the rapid translation and distribution of the Communist Manifesto, which helped create the manifesto as a genre, avant-garde manifestos such as those of Futurism and Surrealism proliferated with breath-taking speed in the early twentieth-century and quickly became the dominant genre of modernism, drawing everything from art to politics into its vortex. One example of this wider impact of the manifesto is a group of philosophers and scientists commonly known as the Vienna Circle. Although this circle was primarily concerned with a technical form of philosophy, it conforms to the features outlined above: it was founded through a collective mani-