Happy 2025 from the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project!

A New Year’s Eve message from the LWP’s founder.

Dear friends,

As many of you know (for it is one of my favourite conversation topics) 1 January is Public Domain Day.

The expiry of copyrights on a work is, in most cases, tied to a certain amount of time elapsing since a certain event: 95 years from publication in the US; 50 or 70 years from the author’s death in most other countries. While these anniversaries may fall on any day of the year, the work only enters the Public Domain on the following 1 January. Among the works that will enter the Public Domain tomorrow in countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” are Henri Matisse’s and Frida Kahlo’s paintings, Thea von Harbou’s and Colette’s writings, and Robert Capa’s photographs.

The reason why the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project was launched on 1 January 2022 was not, thus, the symbolic appeal of a new year’s beginning, but a rather trivial legal constraint turned reason for celebrating.

Similarly, this end-of-year message of mine—which I first wrote to a few colleagues in 2021, and which has now become something of a tradition—is not just to indulge in a moment of retrospection and send out wishes for what is to come. It is also to acknowledge the importance of the Public Domain and urge each other to cherish it and protect it from the trend of erosion.

2024 was a very good year in the Project’s history. Among other things, we:

Published a Portuguese translation of the Tractatus;
Added a “static” version of the tree-like view to each of the editions of the Tractatus which are hosted on the site;
Made substantial progress towards publishing a Hindi translation of the Philosophical Investigations (the proofreading phase is almost complete and we plan to release the web version in a matter of days);
Participated in a very fun and productive edition of the Kirchberg Symposium, during which we finalised the editing of a Portuguese translation of the Notes to Moore and published it;
Completed a project to redraw and index the graphics in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and presented its outcomes at the “Wittgenstein Corpus 2.0” conference in Vienna;
Published a translation of the Lecture on Ethics into Arabic;
Launched the LWP’s blog, which we hope will serve not only as a tool for our volunteers to share news and thoughts about the workings of the Project, but also as an open forum for the Wittgensteinian community.

Thanks to the blog, in fact, today is the first time this yearly message of mine is not only shared with the relatively few team members, supporters, and personal friends of the LWP, but also with the relatively many students, researchers, and enthusiasts who make up this website’s audience. To all of you, I express my sincere gratitude: without its volunteers, the LWP would be an impossible endeavour; but without its readers, it would be a pointless one.

2024 was not an equally good year for the world outside of the Project. Should I try to describe the big picture, “violence” and “misunderstanding” would be the first two words to come to my mind. Let me then simply wish you peace and understanding.

Happy 2025 from the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project!

Michele

Les Oiseaux (1947) by Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Matisse’s paintings enter the Public Domain on 1 January 2025 in countries with a “life plus 70 years” copyright term.

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.