Project:People
Core team · Translators · Acknowledgements
Core team
Michele Lavazza | Coordinator
Michele Lavazza is a translator, digital humanities and 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.
Javier Arango | Editor
Born in 1997 in Los Angeles, Javier Arango is a literary translator and graduate student in the Philosophy Ph.D. program at UCLA. Javier obtained a B.A. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2021, writing a thesis on the metaphilosophy of Rudolf Carnap, which was awarded highest honors. His current research interests are in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and its relations to contemporaneous philosophical traditions.
Melina Bentes | Translator and Editor
Melina Bentes is a master’s candidate in Philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon. She is Portuguese-Brazilian and has been contributing to the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project since 2023 as a translator and editor. She is a lawyer licensed by the Brazilian Bar Association and has research experience in legal theory, critical legal studies and theories of justice. Her ongoing research is concerned with the development of a legal epistemology based in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.
David Chandler | Editor
David Chandler recently obtained a Bachelor of Arts from King’s College London. His current research interests include the work of the Later Wittgenstein, contemporary metaphilosophical considerations, and the history and philosophy of colour. He will soon be commencing his graduate studies at University College London.
Tommaso Furlan | Editor
A University of Milan philosophy graduate, Tommaso Furlan’s main research interest is the early production of Edmund Husserl concerning the philosophy of arithmetics. He is a member of the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project’s proofreading team and he manages the project’s Twitter profile.
Frederic Kettelhoit | Developer
Frederic Kettelhoit is a software developer who fell down the rabbit hole of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and has been trying to make Wittgenstein’s Nachlass more accessible through software ever since. He studied computer science and philosophy before writing his Ph.D. on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics.
Liu Ruoxiao | Developer
Ruoxiao Liu, another software developer, followed soon after, falling down the rabbit hole of Wittgenstein’s philosophy while reflecting on data and GenAI at LSE. Drawn into the wonderland of LLMs, she navigates by the thread of language philosophy.
Eric Rodríguez Ochoa | Editor
Philosopher and theologian. Theorist in criminology and psychoanalysis. Member of the North American Kant Society, Center for Philosophical-Cultural Studies, Latin American Association of Political Science, International Federation of Criminology, Research Partner of the Tales Association, Complutense University of Madrid, At the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina he is a member of the Latin American Network of Patristic Studies. Researcher and editor of dossier on Ludwig Wittgenstein at Fundación Filosófica, Quito, Ecuador. Editor at The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project, Milan, Italy. Founder of the Association Française pour la recherche critique en Philosophie et Théologie: Perspectives Académiques, via OpenEdition e Hypothèses, Paris, France. Writer at PALABRA, cultural supplement of the newspaper El Vigia, Ensenada, Mexico. He completed two academic stays: medicine, philosophy and literature at Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth, Lebanon, and theology, politics and philosophy at Pázmány Péter Catholic University Hungary, as well as a writer for Un Philosophe, a journal specialized in philosophy, Paris, France. He has participated academically in several countries, taking courses, publishing and giving lectures in Colombia, Spain, Hungary, Lebanon, Germany, Italy, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, France and, recently, he has positioned his research in ACADEMIST in Japan
Jasmin Trächtler | Editor
Born 1991, studied in Kassel. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Bergen and the University of Kassel in 2021, with the thesis Wittgensteins Grammatik des Fremdseelischen (Berlin: Metzler, 2021). She has been a Research Fellow at the Wittgenstein Archives Bergen at the University of Bergen (2018-2021) and the Institute for Philosophy at Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris (2020). Her main research interests lie in Wittgenstein, philosophy of language, aesthetics and philosophy of science. She is now an assistant professor at the TU Dortmund.
Filippo Villaggi | Editor
Filippo Villaggi, born 1998, accomplished his Master's Degree in philosophy at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele (Milan) and ICT (Toulouse), with a thesis entitled The End of Philosophy in Martin Heidegger's and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Thought. He contributes to The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project as editor and translator.
Désirée Weber | Editor
Désirée Weber is an Associate Professor at the College of Wooster. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Theory on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and its implications for normativity and judgment at Northwestern University in 2016. Her research has included efforts on archival and digital preservation of Wittgenstein manuscripts, as well as the pedagogic elements of Wittgenstein’s work and biography.
Alexandra Zografou | Outreach
A Greek-born Madrid-based digital project manager, specializing in online product design and development. She is also the Manager of the MVDM Mentor Program at IE and a member of the UWC International Council. She has consulted on and managed a variety of projects in the field of executive education, lifelong learning, and learning innovation, having worked with world-renowned universities and European NGOs. Currently, she is working on a number of youth training and arts & humanities initiatives, while exploring her research interests in a diverse spectrum of areas, such as mentoring, digital humanities, and visual grammar in design.
Translators
Ioanna Bartsidi
Ioanna Bartsidi was born in Thessaloniki in 1993. She studied philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris and is currently preparing a Ph.D. on historicity and presentism in Hegel and post-Hegelianism. She holds an M.A. from the University of Paris 1 and the agrégation de philosophie and is working as a teaching and research assistant at the Université Paris-Nanterre. She has translated various texts into English, French and Greek.
Luca Bernardi
Luca Bernardi (1991) grew up in Bolzano. He has translated more than twenty novels and nonfiction books from English for major Italian publishers. In 2016 he published his first novel Medusa.
Alberto Buscató Vázquez
After studying Biotechnology at the university, motivated, as it were, by the search for knowledge, Alberto Buscató Vázquez decided to change his path to philosophy. For that purpose, he did an M.Sc. in Cognitive Science and an M.A. in philosophy, both in Germany. He currently focuses on writing about culture, history, and philosophy, while planning to live with less and contribute the most.
Marwan Mahmoud
Born in 2000 in Amman, Marwan Mahmoud is a translator, and currently pursuing a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Jordan. His current research interests include Wittgenstein’s philosophy, analytic philosophy and contemporary philosophy. He is the founder of the Arabic-language Ludwig Wittgenstein Project, which he is working on in cooperation with the publishing house Dar Al-Rafidain. He has translated Wittgenstein’s On Certainty into Arabic, and works on translating more books by Wittgenstein within his project.
Rachele Salerno
Rachele Salerno earned her Ph.D. in philosophy through a joint programme of the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo, Modena, Italy and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. She translated several book from German and English for Italian publishers such as Rizzoli and Piemme.
Sergio Sánchez Benítez
Sergio Sánchez Benítez is a writer, translator and expert in communication and security. He holds a Master's degree in philosophy from the Complutense University and another in Journalism from the UAM-EL PAÍS. He was a postgraduate student at the University of Helsinki where he met Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein's literary executor, and Heikki Nyman, his editor in Finnish.
Rolando Vitali
Rolando Vitali obtained his Ph.D. from the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena with a German-language thesis on Nietzsche. He edited and translated the Italian edition of Aesthetic Marx, ed. by Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha (Marx Estetico, Mimesis, 2021).
Peter Winslow
Peter Winslow is a professional translator with over 15 years of experience on both sides of the Atlantic. On the legal side, his practice focuses on translations and certified translations in connection with complex contractual, corporate, and litigation matters. On the literary side, his practice focuses on translations in connection with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus. His published translations include Wittgenstein’s Family Letters: Corresponding with Ludwig.
Acknowledgements
Additionally, we would like to thank all those who contributed some of their time to helping the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project in one way or another:
Lorenza De Meo; Matt Mannisto; Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Ian Ground, and the British Wittgenstein Society; Iolanda Pensa, Marta Arosio, and Wikimedia Italia; Alois Pichler and the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen; Nicolas Bell; Sacha Raoult, Laura Duparc and the Centre Gilles Gaston Granger; Radmila Schweitzer and the Wittgenstein Initiative; Paolo Spinicci; Thomas Houlié; David G. Stern.