Announcing the LWP's blog

The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project’s blog, which we hereby launch, will be a channel for our community to share news about its ongoing activities as well as short essays about Wittgenstein’s life and work.

Since 1 January 2022, most of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings are out of copyright in most countries. The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project’s main goal is, and will remain, to make those writings freely available online, in multiple languages, in the form of edited books which can be read online as well as downloaded.

In the first three years of the LWP’s life, a lot has been done toward that goal. As of this writing, the website contains 16 texts in the original language; 5 translations that had previously been published elsewhere and have either entered the public domain or were released for online publication by the copyright holders; and 28 previously unpublished translations which were made by and for the LWP.

Beside the work which narrowly focuses on the publication of original texts and translations, however, the LWP volunteers have also kept busy with many other tasks. The growing international community which revolves around the project has been maintaining the website and expanding its functionalities, for example by developing a tool to export the HTML pages to multiple formats for reading offline; they have strived to enhance both the accessibility of the texts and the reading experience, for example by developing the tree-like and side-by-side views of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; they have engaged in outreach efforts through social media and in-person events, with the objective of, on the one hand, introducing a non-specialised audience to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and, on the other hand, involving specialists in the effort to make Wittgenstein’s writings more widely available both in the original language and in translation.

During the last year, the LWP’s team has been working on an ambitious project to write an English-language introduction for each of the individual writings that are available on our website. The goal was to afford readers who are not acquainted with Wittgenstien’s work some background information and philosophical context, to help them approach the text with a better degree of understanding. These introductions were to be as neutral as possible, meaning that they were meant not to take controversial stances or attempt difficult interpretations.

A page from Wittgenstein's wartime diaries (see Tagebücher 1914-1916): a log, albeit certainly not a blog.

As the choice of tenses in the previous paragraph may have let on, this project was not entirely successful. Although some of the introductions were indeed written, the review phase made it clear that an encyclopedia-like degree of impartiality was too hard to combine with the brevity and simplicity we were also striving to achieve.

It then occurred to us that those introductions might be repurposed as less neutral, signed essays and still serve a purpose from the point of view of the LWP’s readers. At the very same time, and not coincidentally, we realised that some of the things that we do “behind the scenes” (as part of the daily business of running an open culture project) might be worth talking about, and that we hadn’t yet created a forum for that purpose.

That is how the idea of the LWP’s blog came to be, and here is where I am happy and proud to announce its launch with this first meta-post.

The LWP’s blog aims to be a way for the team to tell our audience about the work we are doing, but also, potentially, a platform for Wittgenstein scholars and aficionados to share thoughts and insights in a more informal way than through a conference talk or a peer-reviewed paper.

Among the things you may expect to find in the blog posts are:

Periodic updates about the state of the project, current activities, and plans for the future; overviews of methods and best practices, that is, accounts of the processes which our community tries to follow and which we think could be interesting and useful to know about for those who work on projects similar to ours (category "LWP meta");
Introductions to specific writings by Wittgenstein, for example in the form of essays on “Why to read the Tractatus”, “Why to read On Certainty”, etc.; and, more generally, pieces whose content deals with Wittgenstein’s life and work (category "Philosophy" and category "Biography");
Announcements or reports on conferences and events related to Wittgenstein (category "Events");
Interviews and discussions with Wittgenstein scholars, translators, etc. (category "Interviews");
News about recently published books, literature reviews, and updates about the work that is being done by ourselves and others on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass (category "Literature");
Pieces about translation and translations, both from a technical and a philosophical point of view (category "Translation(s)");
News about additional features being deployed on the website or technical accounts of how this or that piece of the LWP’s web infrastructure works (category "Technology and infrastructure");
News and short essays (political and combative, if need be) on copyright, with a focus on public domain erosion and public domain enforcement (category "Copyright");
And, why not, some Wittgensteinian humour in the form of memes, jokes, etc. (category "Memes and jokes").

We welcome proposals from our readers: if you’d like to write a post for the blog, please check the guidelines at Submissions.

May this be the first of many: welcome to the LWP’s blog!

About the author

Michele Lavazza

Michele Lavazza is a translator, digital humanities enthusiast, learning technologies specialist, and free culture advocate. He holds a Master’s Degree in philosophy from the University of Milan; his thesis on Wittgenstein and transcendental philosophy was partly written in Milan and partly at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He founded the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project in 2020.