Project:About Wittgenstein: Difference between revisions

Later, he spent some time (1913–1914) in Skjolden, Norway, where he wrote and dictated his first works on logic (the ''[[Notes on Logic]]'' and the ''[[Notes dictated to G.E. Moore in Norway]]''). At the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian army. The war was one of the most revealing experiences of Wittgenstein’s life. Amid the harshness of the conflict, his first and only published work – the ''[[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus]]'', completed during his imprisonment in Cassino (1918–1919) – came to light. The book was published in a first German edition, disapproved by the author, in 1921 and later in the English translation by Wittgenstein’s friend Frank Ramsey (1903–1930) in 1922.

In 1928, however, a conference at mathematician Luitzen Brouwer’s (1881–1966) house reawakened his interest in philosophy, convincing him to move back to Cambridge, where he obtained the teaching qualification. The years from 1928 to 1941 are remembered as a period in which the logical-philosophical theories of the ''Tractatus'' are thoroughly reconsidered: starting with the ''Lecture on Ethics'' (written and delivered in 1929–1930), he revised and modified his ideas on language, logic, the foundations of mathematics, psychology, anthropology, and symbolic forms. The result of these reflections was collected in a series of manuscripts and typescripts (including the ''Philosophical Remarks'', ''Philosophical Grammar'', the ''Big Typescript'', the ''[[Blue Book]]'' and the ''[[Brown Book]]'', ''[[Zettel]]'') by Wittgenstein himself, or annotated during lectures, transcribed, and edited by his students.

In his last years, he deepened his acquaintance with G.H. von Wright (1916–2003), Rush Rhees (1905–1989) and G.E.M. Anscombe (1919–2001), who later became the literary executors and published most of his posthumous works. He died in 1951 at the age of 62.

Wittgenstein’s philosophical production touched upon numerous critical points in contemporary philosophy. It is not incorrect to say that Wittgenstein’s major concern throughout his life was the investigation on language, but it would be reductive to limit the scope of his thought to the philosophy of language and logic. He was stimulated by Hertz, Frege, and Russell, but also Kraus, Spengler, Weininger, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. One cannot reduce his influence to the philosophical area either: he was an attentive reader of Goethe and appreciator of German poetry. Music, moreover, and particularly the classical romantic music of the Liederists and Brahms, remained one of his primary sources of inspiration.

At the time of the ''Tractatus'', the influence of the prevailing logicism restricted his consideration of symbolism to a representational and “realist” perspective, although he brought brilliant innovations to coeval philosophy. The key idea of this first book is the distinction between what can be said (i.e. represented, thus the facts in the world) and what can only be shown (i.e. the forms of the representations); the ''Tractatus'' aims to delimit the realm of meaningful propositions to the realm of science and to prove that ethics, aesthetics, and logic are alike in that they cannot be expressed by words. Wandering between the strictly logical and mystical, Wittgenstein discusses topics that range from the picture-theory of proposition and logical atomism to truth-functionality, from the foundations of ontology and epistemology to the conception of the normativity of natural laws, from reflection on solipsism to ethics, aesthetics and even theology. The logical Wittgenstein of the ''Tractatus'' particularly conditioned the emergence of the neo-positivist philosophy of the so-called Vienna Circle, which was formed in the Austrian capital during the first post-war period and brought together thinkers such as Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Friedrich Waismann (1896–1959).

Wittgenstein wrote a lot but published little: a very short, and hilarious, review of Peter Coffey’s ''The Science of Logic''; the ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus''; a dictionary, or rather a spelling book, for German-speaking schoolchildren; an academic article by the title ''Some Remarks on Logical Form''; a letter to the editor of Mind. Almost everything we now have in volume format was published posthumously. After Wittgenstein died in 1951, his appointed literary executors, E. Anscombe, R. Rhees and G. von Wright, were left with the task of sorting and grouping his handwritten notes and typescripts in order to publish them.

Some parts of the ''Nachlass'' were carefully prepared for publication by Wittgenstein himself, and it is fair to assume that he would have had them printed had he lived longer. The ''Philosophical Investigations'', for which he even wrote a preface in 1945, are the best example of a text thoroughly crafted by Wittgenstein and ready for the press by the time he passed away. In other cases, however, his notes were only published as books after undergoing extensive editing: this is the case, for example, with the lectures he held in Cambridge and the private conversations, that we have received through notes taken by his students and interlocutors. There are as well midway cases, texts such as ''On Certainty'', ''Remarks on Colours'', ''Zettel'', ''Philosophical Grammar'', ''Culture and Value''; in order to prepare this texts for publication the editors selected, grouped, and sorted the remarks.