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View submission: /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 27, 2020
If you have any interest in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, specifically his profound and influential masterwork: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but were intimidated by its density and complexity, I recently made something that could help you dig into it.
When I started to read the book, I found myself getting lost in his sub-points, and sub-points of sub-points, but the way he structured the book in a hierarchical, tree-like way made me think of depth-first vs breadth-first searching in computer science.
The linear book format implicitly restricts readings of these structures to depth-first search, going as deep into the concept as possible before zooming back up to the highest level of abstraction and going back in. This format, using the website WorkFlowy, allows you to do a breadth-first search of the work, starting with the most abstract and general propositions and working into the details progressively. I’ve found it useful and I hope others will as well.
The site operates like a collapsible bullet point list, and clicking on the bullet points allows you to zoom into a view of only that sub-list.
Sadly, diagrams and some mathematical symbols are not available. If you find any issues I missed, please let me know and I can edit it. Feel free to share this link or copy the content.
Additionally, if anyone knows of other texts where this format could be particularly helpful to reading, please let me know, and I can try to do the same for them.
There's nothing here!