The Eye and the Visual Field: Much Ado About Nothing?

Abstract

The standard version of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has a certain picture as an iconic explanation of TLP 5.6331. In that picture, the eye is located within the visual field. In various papers as well as in his last edition of the TLP (2021), Luciano Bazzocchi maintains, on the basis of certain important evidences involving other sketches made by Wittgenstein himself, that the picture must be replaced by another picture locating the eye at the origin of the visual field. Whoever is exegetically right, the issue is not theoretically decisive. For what Wittgenstein simply wants to claim there is that, in its having no definite boundaries, the visual field necessarily depends on a point of view: This claim will be partially disputed by Wittgenstein himself in the later phase of his philosophy.