Shigeki Noya's Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a very nice interpretation of the Tractatus in several respects. First, Noya clarifies Wittgenstein's aim as "presenting the solution to all philosophical problems." To solve all philosophical problems means for Wittgenstein that the "limits of thought" be made clear. More precisely, for Noya, Wittgenstein is aiming to characterize the objects of possible thought. In this respect, Wittegenstein's project is a variation of Kantianims, yet it is a logical (instead of an empirical) Kantianism, as Noya also points out.
Second, key terms such as "form" and "representation" or "image" are elucidated quite nicely by Noya. This leads to a very concise and clear introduction to how Wittgenstein criticizes Russell's theory of types and yet at the same time presents a solution to (or rather, the dissolution of) Russell's Paradox. Noya claims that from Wittgenstein's understanding of philosophical language as having a logical structure which is the image of facts only structured in a counterfactual way, as well as his treatment of every term in a proposition as a "name" (Wittgenstein's nominalism), it follows that Russell's set of all sets will be either a member of that set (tautology) or it would not be a set of all sets in the first place. In other words, for Wittgenstein, every repeated function, where an output is then directly once again turned into an input into the "same" function, in reality transforms the function itself, and thus it is impossible to see such a function as "same" after repetiton.
Thirdly, Noya draws a clear line between the early and later Wittgenstein, and shows that there is no contradiction between the two phases. Thus, it is senseless to claim that the Tractatus "fails" because it cannot talk about language that is non-representative. For the project is to find the limits of thought, and language which is appropriate to thought is necessarily representative, or at least this is how Wittgenstein construes it. (And here "representative" must not be understood as "picture-thinking," or at least on Noya's interpretation, since non-sensible terms such as those of relation or spatio-temporal position are also part of such "representations.") In this context, the question as to how we first learn the meaning of language, as well as how we use language as a whole, do not need to be discussed at all. The "whole" of linguistic practices and their acquisition are both simply presupposed as facts in the Tractatus.
Finally, the enigmatic proposition "the limit of language is the limit of my world" as well as "I am my world" are elucidated once again quite nicely. Bernard Williams, in his The Sense of the Past, interprets these claims as idealistic onces, even solipsistic. However, Williams overlooks the distinction between what Noya calls "phenomenal" and "logical" solipsisms. Phenomenal solipsism claims that it is impossible for me to experience what others feel at all, since others do not even exist for me in the first place. Logical solipsism, which is Wittgenstein:s position, claims that I can only experience and understand what others are expressing within a shared logical structure. Thus, as long as others are within the limits of intelligibility prescribed by the logic which I happen to assume, these others are genuinely part of my world. In this context, Noya further draws attention to the distinction between claiming that "The world is my own" and that "I am my world," and points out that the former totalizes the world under the experience of one subjectivity, whereas the latter merely identifies the subject with the world given to it as its background logical structure. The latter is Wittegenstein's position, and this gives us a positive definition of the subject a precisely the limit of the world, i.e. the limit of language.
Noya closes the book by pointing out how Wittgenstein does not think deeply about the transition from one logical structure to another in his Tractatus. Wittgenstein also does not sufficiently account for hacceity, the idea that "thisness" is essential to the intelligibility of a particular or singular object. Finally, and this is what I notice as a gap in both Noya's and Wittgenstein's thoughts, Wittgenstein still treats the "negation of negation" as identical with affirmation, and thus misses the point that whereas the latter merely predicates one predicates without thereby excluding others from the possibility of predication (e.g. "A dog is white" does not exclude the possibility that it is brown, black, gold, etc.) the former does, thus singularizing and defining the concept in a concrete way (e.g. "A dog is not non-white" says that a dog cannot have any othe predicate except being white.) Hacceity also is a universal logical form which is required for the coherence of the Tractatus - this is what Noya maintains - and yet is something which is not explicitly deduced within the Tractatus itself. Again, Hegel's way of opening the Phenomenology's "Sense-Certainty" chapter can give us an entry-point into the Tractatus which is both plausible and also consistent with the Tractatus's appeal to hacceity.
