Abstract

wo independent publishing projects have thoroughly changed the state of Wittgenstein scholarship in recent years. Michael Nedo's 'Wiener Ausgabe'1 offers a traditional critical edition of Wittgenstein's philosophical writings ranging from 1929 up to and including the 'Big Typescript' (1933). Considering the eclectic and - at times - arbitrary editorial policy underlying previous publications from the Nachlass2 Nedo's project offers unprecedented philosophical rigor as well as textual criticism in volumes designed for comfortable reading. A second, more ambitious, attempt at a critical edition is the Bergen electronic edition.3 It is planned to include 4 CD-ROMs, covering the entire range of the philosopher's unpublished writing. Two disks are currently available, comprising all of Wittgenstein's manuscripts from 1929-1939, as well as type-scripts, beginning with 'Notes on Logic' (1913) and leading up to Typescript 226, composed in 1939. Wittgenstein's writings from the Thirties are, therefore, available in independent, reliable printed and electronic editions respectively. Readers can, for the first time, observe the philosopher at work, transferring paragraphs from pocket notebooks to handwritten 'volumes'; picking acceptable remarks to be included in type-scripts that are, at a later stage, cut up into slips of paper which are again annotated, rearranged and put together in further volumes and type-scripts. But this is only half the excitement. The 'Wiener Ausgabe' and the 'Bergen Edition' stake their success on different media, inevitably provoking a comparison between the well known features of printed scholarly editions and the not so familiar realm of digitized texts