Tractarian Footsteps - Wittgenstein Tries a New Ladder

By the time Wittgenstein started to dictate the BLUE BOOK to his students at Cambridge, the course of his new method of philosophical analysis was firmly set. He applied this method so relentlessly in his critique of private experience and solipsism that it might easily seem that Wittgenstein had abandoned the somewhat favorable position on solipsism he had taken in the TRACTATUS. The argument of this paper is that the BLUE BOOK's criticism was directed at attempts to expound and defend solipsism rather than to the overall viewpoint of solipsism itself, thus reinforcing Wittgenstein's claim in the TRACTATUS that what the solipsist means cannot be said but makes itself manifest.