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Tractatus Quanticus

Niccolò Covoni, Carlo Rovelli C

Published Jan 3, 2026• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

This is a re-editing, which takes quantum mechanics into account, of Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus. The operation has a playful side in the form, but is a serious attempt to capture possible philosophical implications of the Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and formalize the naturalistic third-way between realism and instrumentalism explored by this interpretation.

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It is argued that the Tractatus is an analogy of the classical description of physical reality. We know that this had to be replaced by the much more ephemeral quantum theory. It is argued that many of the features of Wittgenstein's later work could have been applied to quantum physics, if only he had known about this. The argument at some points refers directly to modern physics in a way Wittgenstein could not have done; he did not know modern science.

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Tractatus Quanticus

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This is a re-editing, which takes quantum mechanics into account, of Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus. The operation has a playful side in the form, but is a serious attempt to capture possible philosophical implications of the Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and formalize the naturalistic third-way between realism and instrumentalism explored by this interpretation.

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Tractatus Quanticum (arXiv:2512.06034 [quant-ph]) is described by its authors as 'a re-editing, which takes quantum mechanics into account, of Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus.' The original Tractatus appeared with an introduction by Bertrand Russell. For Tractatus Quanticum, that role fell to us. This is the result.

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The New Tractatus Program: Quantum Mechanics, Anti-Totalitarian Ontology, and Consciousness

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This article reads two recent tractatus-style texts - Niccolo Covoni and Carlo Rovelli's Tractatus Quanticus (arXiv:2512.06034) and Mikolaj Sienicki and Krzysztof Sienicki's Tractatus de Conscientia (arXiv:2607.05459) - together with Jenann Ismael and Huw Price's interpretive introduction Against Totalitarianism (arXiv:2601.01070), as parts of what may be called a New Tractatus Program. The program is unified by a single pressure point: the demand for a perspective-free description of reality, whether as a final inventory of facts, a world viewed from nowhere, or a self placed outside the physical order. On the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, Tractatus Quanticus revises Wittgenstein's opening claim by replacing the world as the totality of facts with the world as what is the case from some perspective. Against Totalitarianism then makes the philosophical stakes of this move explicit by challenging the idea of the world as one closed totality. Tractatus de Conscientia carries the same discipline into the theory of consciousness, where conscious experience is treated neither as a mysterious substance nor as mere behavior, but as an integrated, temporally thick, operationally accessible perspective. Read together, these texts point toward a post-classical philosophy of partiality: reality is not abolished, but de-absolutized; consciousness is not mystified, but constrained by access, coupling, memory, and evidence; and the limits of language become inseparable from the limits of perspective. The article does not claim that relational quantum mechanics is the only viable interpretation of quantum theory. It instead develops the philosophical consequences of the relational reading. Its aim is programmatic rather than demonstrative: it does not prove a new ontology, but organizes a family of arguments around disciplined perspective-dependence.

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THE RELATIONAL INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS AND CONTEXTUAL REALISM

Философия науки•Jan 1, 2019•1 citation
This is a re-editing, which takes quantum mechanics into account, of Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus. The operation has a playful side in the form, but is a serious attempt to capture possible philosophical implications of the Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and formalize the naturalistic third-way between realism and instrumentalism explored by this interpretation.
This article reads two recent tractatus-style texts - Niccolo Covoni and Carlo Rovelli's Tractatus Quanticus (arXiv:2512.06034) and Mikolaj Sienicki and Krzysztof Sienicki's Tractatus de Conscientia (arXiv:2607.05459) - together with Jenann Ismael and Huw Price's interpretive introduction Against Totalitarianism (arXiv:2601.01070), as parts of what may be called a New Tractatus Program. The program is unified by a single pressure point: the demand for a perspective-free description of reality, whether as a final inventory of facts, a world viewed from nowhere, or a self placed outside the physical order. On the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, Tractatus Quanticus revises Wittgenstein's opening claim by replacing the world as the totality of facts with the world as what is the case from some perspective. Against Totalitarianism then makes the philosophical stakes of this move explicit by challenging the idea of the world as one closed totality. Tractatus de Conscientia carries the same discipline into the theory of consciousness, where conscious experience is treated neither as a mysterious substance nor as mere behavior, but as an integrated, temporally thick, operationally accessible perspective. Read together, these texts point toward a post-classical philosophy of partiality: reality is not abolished, but de-absolutized; consciousness is not mystified, but constrained by access, coupling, memory, and evidence; and the limits of language become inseparable from the limits of perspective. The article does not claim that relational quantum mechanics is the only viable interpretation of quantum theory. It instead develops the philosophical consequences of the relational reading. Its aim is programmatic rather than demonstrative: it does not prove a new ontology, but organizes a family of arguments around disciplined perspective-dependence.