Blog:Happy 2025 from the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project!: Difference between revisions

As many of you know (for it is one of my favourite topics of conversation) 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, however, 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”, for example, are Henri Matisse’s and Frida Kahlo’s paintings, Thea von Harbou’s and Colette’s writings, and Robert Capa’s photographs.

Similarly, this end-of-year message of mine, which I first wrote to a few colleagues at the end of 2021, the night before the website went live, 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 [[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (português)|a Portuguese translation of the ''Tractatus'']],

* Added [[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (static tree-like view)|a “static” version of the tree-like view of the ''Tractatus'']] to each of the editions which are hosted on the site,

* Published a Hindi translation of the ''Philosophical Investigations'',

* Participated in a very fun and productive edition of the Kirchberg Symposium, during which we finalised the editing of a [[Notas Ditadas a G.E. Moore na Noruega|Portuguese translation of the ''Notes to Moore'']] and published it,

* Completed [https://nachlass-graphics.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page 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 [[محاضرة في علم الأخلاق|a translation of the ''Lecture on Ethics'' into Arabic]],

Thanks to the blog, in fact, this is the first time this yearly message of mine is not only sent out to the relatively few team members, supporters and personal friends of the LWP, but also to the relatively many students, researchers, and casual readers who have visited the website in the last three years. To all of you, I express my sincere gratitude: without its volunteers, the LWP’s “mission” would be impossible; but without its readers, it would be pointless.

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

Michele[[File:Tauben, 2016.jpg|400px|center|thumb|"Doves" by Bruno Weber, 2016.]]