Project:About Wittgenstein: Difference between revisions

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (Vienna, 26 April 1889 - Cambridge, 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who mostly worked and taught at the University of Cambridge. He is widely considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.

Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, he soon became acquainted with the most relevant figures of Viennese ''fin de siècle'' culture (J. Brahms, G. Klimt, G. Mahler, K. 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]]'', 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.

== An outline of Wittgenstein's thought ==

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.

[[File:The Fountain in Winter at Trinity College Cambridge.jpg|thumb|320x320px|The Trinity College in Cambridge, where Wittgenstein mostly lived and held lessons from 1929 to 1941.]]

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).

== About Wittgenstein's works and The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project's policy ==

Now, the ''Nachlass'' itself – the collection of Wittgenstein’s manuscript material, the “raw” Wittgenstein – has been available online since the 2010s, almost in its entirety, both in a fac-simile edition and in an XML/HTML transcription. This was made possible by the generosity of the copyright holders of the originals, [https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/library/wren-digital-library/modern-manuscripts/wittgenstein/ The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge], and the work of the [http://wab.uib.no/ Wittgenstein Archives Bergen]. Much of the digitalized content has been released under the [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license].

== Individual works ==

|content= In 1913, Wittgenstein published a very short review of philosopher and mathematician Peter Coffey’s ''The science of logic'' in ''The Cambridge Review'' (vol. 34, no. 853, 6 Mar. 1913, p. 351). In an openly ironic tone, Wittgenstein argues against the antiquated views of the author and the inaccuracies of the logical notions he expresses, some of which – such as the subject-predicate form of the proposition, the relationship between thought and reality, and the logical-semantic function of the verb “to be” – will have an important development in Wittgenstein’s own later works.

|content=According to Rush Rhees, in 1929 Wittgenstein’s disciple Maurice O’Connor Drury (1907-1976) procured and read to his mentor passages from the English anthropologist Sir James George Frazer's (1854-1941) ''The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion'' (in the 12-volume edition of 1906-1915). A series of remarks in German were drawn by Wittgenstein from the reading in 1931; they were later revised and expanded, after 1936 and probably after 1948. Rhees edited the notes on Frazer for publication and they appeared in 1967 in the German journal ''Synthese''. The published text brings together extracts of Wittgenstein’s ''Nachlass'' Ms-110, Ts-211 and Ms-143.