Project:About Wittgenstein: Difference between revisions

Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, he soon became acquainted with some of the most important figures of Viennese ''fin de siècle'' culture (Johannes Brahms, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus). He completed his studies in mechanical engineering in Manchester, where he developed a keen interest in the works on logic and the philosophy of mathematics by Gottlob Frege (1948–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). He therefore moved to Cambridge in 1911 to attend the lessons of Russell, who immediately noticed his sharp perspicacity, as well as his troubled attitude.

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 (English)|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.

Turning away from philosophical thought, from 1922 to 1928 Wittgenstein devoted himself to elementary school teaching in a small Austrian village, to architecture – he built his sister Margarete’s house – and to working as a gardener in a convent. The interest which the newborn, neo-positivist Vienna Circle paid to his work elicited rather cold reactions on his part.

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'' were 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.

During World War II, he served in a civil hospital. In the period between 1947 and 1950 he spent time in England, Ireland, and the USA, where in the summer of 1949 he sketched out his ''[[Über Gewißheit|On Certainty]]''. But his best known and most memorable, albeit unfinished work from this period remains the ''[[Philosophische Untersuchungen|Philosophical Investigations]]'', the masterpiece of the “later” Wittgenstein, which, ever since its publication in 1953, has been fertile ground for contemporary philosophy.

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 much 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, and Kierkegaard. 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 representation); 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 meaningful propositions. Wandering between the strictly logical and the 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 theology. The logical Wittgenstein of the ''Tractatus'' particularly conditioned the emergence of the neo-positivist philosophy of the 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).

The discontinuity between his youthful thought and his mature reflections has often been emphasized – even by Wittgenstein himself, in some passages – especially in relation to the connotation of the nature of language – formally structured in the “early” Wittgenstein, linked to the variable forms of culture in the “later” Wittgenstein. However, lines of continuity can be discerned, especially in the conception of philosophy as a “critique of language" and the “ethical point” of philosophical work, which is not intended to operate a foundation or give rise to a theory, but contains a transformative force of the human being.

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 midway cases as well, 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.

Based on our expertise in the field of copyright, we at The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project decided to only publish those texts for which we had strong reasons to determine that the editor’s work can not be considered creative. The list of available texts meeting these criteria is constantly being updated.