This volume collects the most substantial correspondence and documents relating to Wittgenstein’s long association with Cambridge between the years 1911 and his death in 1951, including the letters he exchanged with his most illustrious Cambridge contemporaries Russell, Keynes, Moore and Ramsey (and previously published as Cambridge Letters). Now expanded to include 200 previously unpublished letters and documents, including correspondence between Wittgenstein and the economist Piero Srafafa, and between Wittgenstein and his pupils Includes extensive editorial (...) annotations Provides a fascinating and intimate insight into Wittgenstein’s life and thought. (shrink)

This volume collects the most substantial correspondence and documents relating to Wittgenstein's long association with Cambridge between the years 1911 and his death in 1951, including the letters he exchanged with his most illustrious Cambridge contemporaries Russell, Keynes, Moore, and Ramsey. Now expanded to include 200 previously unpublished letters and documents, including correspondence between Wittgenstein and the economist Piero Sraffa, and between Wittgenstein and his pupils Includes extensive editorial annotations Provides a fascinating and intimate insight (...) into Wittgenstein's life and thought. (shrink)

This volume collects the most substantial correspondence and documents relating to Wittgenstein's long association with Cambridge between the years 1911 and his death in 1951, including the letters he exchanged with his most illustrious Cambridge contemporaries Russell, Keynes, Moore, and Ramsey. Now expanded to include 200 previously unpublished letters and documents, including correspondence between Wittgenstein and the economist Piero Sraffa, and between Wittgenstein and his pupils Includes extensive editorial annotations Provides a fascinating and intimate insight (...) into Wittgenstein's life and thought. (shrink)

This volume includes nearly everything contained in Cambridge Letters, supplemented by Wittgenstein’s exchanges with Sraffa, by correspondence with many of his students, and by various documents pertaining to his status in the University and to the Moral Sciences meetings. Throughout, there are notes by McGuinness that provide details about persons, places, and events mentioned in the texts. Altogether, the volume offers rich rewards for both students of Wittgenstein and those interested in the interplay of the times.Wittgenstein (...) was Austrian to the core, as is evident in his admiration for such distinctly Viennese cultural icons as Nestroy, Grillparzer, Labor, Weininger, and Kraus—none of whom was familiar in the circles within which he moved in Cambridge. In his introduction, however, McGuinness makes clear that Cambridge, not Vienna, was the place where Wittgenstein could work. There were no roots in Cambridge, compared to those in Vienna, but growth, it seems, had to take place away from the roots. During his first stay in Cambridge Wittgenstein established connections with the giants of the time: Russell, Moore, and Keynes, all of whom had been active members of the Apostles, and who. (shrink)

This volume collects the most substantial correspondence and documents relating to Wittgenstein's long association with Cambridge between the years 1911 and his death in 1951, including the letters he exchanged with his most illustrious Cambridge contemporaries Russell, Keynes, Moore, and Ramsey. Now expanded to include 200 previously unpublished letters and documents, including correspondence between Wittgenstein and the economist Piero Sraffa, and between Wittgenstein and his pupils Includes extensive editorial annotations Provides a fascinating and intimate insight (...) into Wittgenstein's life and thought. (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret (...) Macdonald, from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book.

Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa (1906-1981) was a Polish philosopher and student of Kazimierz Twardowski, the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School. In 1938 she went to the University of Cambridge (Newnham College) on a Sarah Smitton Fellowship. There she attended George Edward Moore’s lectures as well as one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics in 1939. In this interview which was conducted with Alois Eder she talks about her encounter with Wittgenstein. It was published in 1978 in (...) the Polish art and culture magazine Odra and is her only published memoir about Wittgenstein. The interview is republished here both in English translation and as facsimile of the original publication with the kind permission of the Odra magazine. (shrink)

From his return to Cambridge in 1929 to his death in 1951, Wittgenstein influenced philosophy almost exclusively through teaching and discussion. These lecture notes indicate what he considered to be salient features of his thinking in this period of his life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents, 1911–1951Newton GarverBrian McGuinness, editor. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents, 1911–1951. Malden, MA-Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. vii + 498. Cloth, $134.95.This volume includes nearly everything contained in Cambridge Letters (Blackwell, 1995), supplemented by Wittgenstein’s exchanges with Sraffa (not available in 1995), by correspondence with many of his students, and by various documents pertaining to his status (...) in the University and to the Moral Sciences meetings. Throughout, there are notes by McGuinness that provide details about persons, places, and events mentioned in the texts. Altogether, the volume offers rich rewards for both students of Wittgenstein and those interested in the interplay of the times.Wittgenstein was Austrian to the core, as is evident in his admiration for such distinctly Viennese cultural icons as Nestroy, Grillparzer, Labor, Weininger, and Kraus—none of whom was familiar in the circles within which he moved in Cambridge. In his introduction, however, McGuinness makes clear that Cambridge, not Vienna, was the place where Wittgenstein could work. There were no roots in Cambridge, compared to those in Vienna, but growth, it seems, had to take place away from the roots. During his first stay in Cambridge (1912–14) Wittgenstein established connections with the giants of the time: Russell, Moore, and Keynes, all of whom had been active members of the Apostles, and who therefore put him in touch with the Bloomsbury-flavored younger elite of the University. Although none of these relationships was smooth, they all served in 1929 to ease Wittgenstein’s re-entry into Cambridge.Once back at Cambridge, and back at work in philosophy, Wittgenstein established his own circle, composed of younger scholars who attended his lectures. The only contact from the early period with whom he remained close through the 1930s and ’40s was Moore, although neither Russell nor Keynes disappeared entirely. Moore attended Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1930–33, and the two met regularly whenever Wittgenstein was in Cambridge. Among his peers, the big addition was Piero Sraffa, the Italian economist who was, as McGuinness puts it, first a protegé and then a successor of Keynes. It is difficult to reconstruct the content of the conversations between these two powerful intellects, but the letters and notes included here make it plain that the conversations were intense and had continuing themes. The Sraffa documents have been available elsewhere, but the chronological order of the documents in this volume means that we can now see them in the wider context of Wittgenstein’s ongoing activity.Wittgenstein and Sraffa were both equals and opposites—equal in genius, in honesty, in forthrightness, in stubbornness, and in commitment to dialogue, but opposite in opinions and convictions. Time and again, the letters and notes show evidence of tough, wrenching discussions, at times suspended because of exhaustion and weariness. Wittgenstein lists Sraffa last (chronologically, we presume) of ten people who influenced his thought. The letters and notes in this volume confirm a powerful influence, but offer scant clues as to the direction of the influence in Wittgenstein’s later thought.One of the younger scholars was the physicist W. H. Watson, who became Distinguished Professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His On Understanding Physics is, [End Page 115] McGuinness reports, a reliable guide of Wittgenstein’s thinking on these matters. In their correspondence we find many instances of what they both regarded as nonsense penned by the great scientists of the day (Jeans, Eddington, and Einstein). The nonsense appears to have presented grand pronouncements in everyday language, concerning mundane rather than distinctively philosophical matters. By providing new insight into how Wittgenstein relished nonsensical items, the correspondence with Watson helps us appreciate Wittgenstein’s nose for nonsense as part of his philosophical genius.For Wittgenstein, happiness depended on work. This is evident in his Notebooks 1914–1916 and again in these documents. For example, on June 17, 1941, he writes to Moore, “About six weeks ago I suddenly... began to be able to write again. Quite possibly this will last only for a very short time; but it feels good while it lasts and has made a great deal of difference to me... (shrink)

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy even though only one of his works, the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in his lifetime. Beyond this publication the impact of his thought was mainly conveyed to a small circle of students through his lectures at Cambridge University. Fortunately, many of his ideas have survived in both the dictations that were subsequently published, and the notes taken by his students, among them Alice Ambrose and the late Margaret (...) Macdonald, from 1932 to 1935. These notes, now edited by Professor Ambrose, are here published, and they shed much light on Wittgenstein's philosophical development. Among the topics considered are the meaning of a word and its relation to common usage, rules of grammar and their relation to fact, the grammar of first person statements, language games, and the nature of philosophy. This volume is indispensable to any serious discussion of Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

In April 1939, G. E. Moore read a paper to the Cambridge University Moral Science Club entitled ‘Certainty’. In it, amongst other things, Moore made the claims that: the phrase ‘it is certain’ could be used with sense-experience-statements, such as ‘I have a pain’, to make statements such as ‘It is certain that I have a pain’; and that sense-experience-statements can be said to be certain in the same sense as some material-thing-statements can be — namely in the sense (...) that they can be safely counted on. When Moore later read his paper to Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein took violent exception to it, and the two entered into a heated exchange. The only known notes of this exchange are a previously unpublished verbatim record of part of it, taken by Norman Malcolm. This paper is an edition of Malcolm’s notes. These notes are valuable for both philosophical and scholarly reasons. They give us a glimpse of a sustained exchange between Wittgenstein and a real-life interlocutor; they contain a defence by Wittgenstein of the idea that a word’s use can illuminate its meaning; and they provide evidence of Wittgenstein’s philosophical engagement with the topic of certainty, and with Moore’s thought on it, long before he began to write the notes which make up On Certainty, in 1949. (shrink)

Review of a collection of letters to and from Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein’s Whewell’s Court Lectures contains previously unpublished notes from lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein between 1938 and 1941. The volume offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein’s thought and includes some of the finest examples of Wittgenstein’s lectures in regard to both content and reliability. Many notes in this text refer to lectures from which no other detailed notes survive, offering new contexts to Wittgenstein’s examples and metaphors, and providing a more thorough and systematic (...) treatment of many topics Each set of notes is accompanied by an editorial introduction, a physical description and dating of the notes, and a summary of their relation to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass Offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas, in particular his ideas about certainty and concept-formation The lectures include more than 70 illustrations of blackboard drawings, which underline the importance of visual thought in Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy Challenges the dating of some already published lecture notes, including the Lectures on Freedom of the Will and the Lectures on Religious Belief. (shrink)

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work . . . are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they (...) are not, but from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "[ Philosophical Remarks ] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's The Analysis of Mind . He modifies the Tractatus 's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."--Robert Hoffman, Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."--Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association. (shrink)

These works, as the sub-title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-1934: the 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It is indispensable (...) therefore to students of Witgenstein's thought and to all those who wish to study at first-hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. (shrink)

From his return to Cambridge in 1929 to his death in 1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who published only one work in his lifetime, influenced philosophy almost exclusively through teaching and discussion. These lecture notes, therefore, are an important record of the development of Wittgenstein's thought; they indicate the interests he maintained in his later years and signal what he considered the salient features of his thinking. Further, the notes from an enlightening addition to his posthumously published writings. P. (...) T. Geach, A. C. Jackson, and K. J. Shah kept meticulous notes from the last formal course that Wittgenstein taught at Cambridge. In order to reconstruct as accurately as possible the words of Wittgenstein, this volume compiles all three sets of notes with no attempt to conflate or edit them beyond rendering them into lucid English. Topics covered by the notes in this volume include the private language argument, the grammar of sensation statements, certainty and experimentation in psychology, and, in general, the same set of concerns as are to be found in his Last Writings and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology . The source material provided in these lecture notes is vital to Wittgenstein scholarship. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a reclusive and enigmatic philosopher, writing his most significant work off campus in remote locations. He also held a chair in the Philosophy Department at Cambridge, and is one of the university’s most recognized even if, as Ray Monk says, ‘reluctant professors’ of philosophy. Paradoxically, although Wittgenstein often showed contempt for the atmosphere at Cambridge and for academic philosophy in particular, it is hard to conceive of him making his significant contributions without considerable (...) support from his academic colleagues, his research fellowship and later teaching career at Cambridge. It is this conflicted relationship we explore, between the revolutionary thinker and his base within an educational institution. Starting from a brief biographical sketch of Wittgenstein’s academic life at Cambridge, including his involvement as a student and faculty member in the Moral Sciences Club, we look at how he reconceived the role of philosophy throughout this... (shrink)

These works, as the sub-title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-1934: the 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It is indispensable (...) therefore to students of Witgenstein's thought and to all those who wish to study at first-hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. (shrink)

This edition of G. E. Moore's notes taken at Wittgenstein's seminal Cambridge lectures in the early 1930s provides, for the first time, an almost verbatim record of those classes. The presentation of the notes is both accessible and faithful to their original manuscripts, and a comprehensive introduction and synoptic table of contents provide the reader with essential contextual information and summaries of the topics in each lecture. The lectures form an excellent introduction to Wittgenstein's middle-period thought, covering (...) a broad range of philosophical topics, ranging from core questions in the philosophy of language, mind, logic, and mathematics, to illuminating discussions of subjects on which Wittgenstein says very little elsewhere, including ethics, religion, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. The volume also includes a 1932 essay by Moore critiquing Wittgenstein's conception of grammar, together with Wittgenstein's response. A companion website offers access to images of the entire set of source manuscripts. (shrink)

In 1938 Wittgenstein delivered a short course of lectures on aesthetics to a small group of students at Cambridge. The present volume has been compiled from notes taken down at the time by three of the students: Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. They have been supplemented by notes of conversations on Freud (to whom reference was made in the course on aesthetics) between Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees, and by notes of some lectures on religious belief. (...) As very little is known of Wittgenstein's views on these subjects from his published works, these notes should be of considerable interest to students of contemporary philosophy. Further, their fresh and informal style should recommend Wittgenstein to those who find his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations a little formidable. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In _Wittgenstein in Exile_, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein -- as an exile -- that helps make sense of (...) this. Wittgenstein's exile was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era -- Oswald Spengler's culture of the early nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlaß, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work. (shrink)

The article draws a connection between three items preserved at the von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki (WWA), namely a book by Wilhelm Busch and two copies of the photos of von Wright and Wittgenstein in Cambridge taken by Knut Erik Tranøy in 1950, by suggesting that the photos contain an allusion by Wittgenstein.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In _Wittgenstein in Exile_, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein -- as an exile -- that helps make sense of (...) this. Wittgenstein's exile was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era -- Oswald Spengler's culture of the early nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlaß, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work. (shrink)

The essay begins by briefly reviewing the complex history of the collaborative long-distance editing work that led to the publication of Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2016). It then turns to a discussion of the rationale for the innovative editorial policies we ultimately developed and implemented, and some of the broader methodological issues that they raise.

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of (...) the human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life. (shrink)

This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the first programs in machine translation, information retrieval, mechanical abstracting, (...) and knowledge representation technologies in the early 1950s, all of which have later been claimed for AI and cognitive science. I focus on the philosophical work of CLRU founder Margaret Masterman and her extraordinary but forgotten contributions to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

The so-called "Big Typescript" is Wittgenstein's first attempt to publish in a book his collected thoughts since his return to Cambridge and to philosophical writing, thus correcting the "serious errors" (Wittgenstein) of his early work. Among the texts in Wittgenstein's estate, the "Big Typescript" is the one that, next to the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" (the "Tractatus") of 1918, appears to be the most "finished", with a table of contents structured in chapters and sections. It is, however, a (...) fragment, without either title, motto or conclusion. To Wittgenstein, it was important "that the thoughts in [the book] should progress from one subject to another in well-ordered consecutiveness." It is precisely this structure of the "Big Typescript", though ultimately rejected by Wittgenstein, which constitutes the immeasurable value of the text for the study of and as an introduction to Wittgenstein's thinking. (shrink)

Having visited Ireland regularly during the 1930s, Ludwig Wittgenstein resigned his Cambridge philosophy professorship in 1947 and moved there, living in a fishing village on the Atlantic coast and hotels in Dublin and the Wicklow Mountains. Although Wittgenstein spent some time out of the country, Ireland was effectively his base for three very productive years during which he worked on what would become one of his key books, the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein in Ireland represents (...) the first sustained account of Wittgenstein's time in Ireland, placing it in its historical context. Wall pays a good deal of attention to the representation of the Irish landscape in which the Austrian philosopher found himself able to work; a large part of his writings were produced in the bleak landscapes of Ireland and Norway. (shrink)

Written in code under constant threat of battle, Wittgenstein's searing and illuminating diaries finally emerge in this first-ever English translation. During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualize the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in (...) English, the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them. Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality, and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death. Much like Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself. (shrink)

This chapter presents a facsimile of manuscript (MS) 139a pages 15 and 16 of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, one of the two surviving manuscripts of the so‐called Lecture on Ethics delivered to The Heretics, a Cambridge student society. The text is in English in pencil on loose sheets of 204x330 mm. The text in the facsimile images is presented in normal text below each image to provide the reader a better understanding of the content in the images.

This chapter discusses about the description of two manuscripts MS 139a and MS 139b. It explains about the typescript TS 207. The manuscript of MS 139a is held at the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It comprises 12 loose sheets written in pencil, both in recto and in verso, with many corrections and marks. The content is oriented in landscape position with the original binding edge at the bottom. The manuscript of MS 139b is held at the Österreichische (...) Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. The manuscript comprises 10 loose sheets written in pencil, both in recto and verso, except for the last page, which is written solely in recto. The typescript TS 207 is held at the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The text bears neither title nor date. They are numbered with Arabic numerals typed in the upper left corner and handwritten in the upper right corner. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most important, influential, and often-cited philosophers of the twentieth century, yet he remains one of its most elusive and least accessible. The essays in this volume address central themes in Wittgenstein's writings on the philosophy of mind, language, logic, and mathematics. They chart the development of his work and clarify the connections between its different stages. The contributors illuminate the character of the whole body of work by keeping a tight focus on (...) some key topics: the style of the philosophy, the conception of grammar contained in it, rule-following, convention, logical necessity, the self, and what Wittgenstein called, in a famous phrase, 'forms of life'. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s experiments on rhythm, conducted in Charles Myers’s laboratory in Cambridge during the years 1912–13, are his earliest recorded engagement in thinking about music, not just appreciating it, and philosophizing by means of musical thinking. In this essay, I set these experiments within their appropriate intellectual, scientific, and philosophical context in order to show that, its minor scientific importance notwithstanding, this onetime excursion into empirical research provided an early onset for Wittgenstein’s career-long exploration of the philosophically pervasive (...) implications of aspects. Dramatically moving beyond the conceptual limitations, which were inscribed by Charles Myers’s scientific program, Wittgenstein got a glimpse of a philosophical angle, which was bound to become very important to him not only in aesthetics, but also for his overarching philosophical development. He became interested in what we actually do when we re-phrase, compare, come up with good similes in order to illuminate something definite within the space of possibility, so a new aspect may come to life. (shrink)

Cheryl Misak offers a strikingly new view of the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Pragmatism, the home-grown philosophy of America, thinks of truth not as a static relation between a sentence and the believer-independent world, but rather, a belief that works. The founders of pragmatism, Peirce and James, developed this idea in more and less objective ways. The standard story of the reception of American pragmatism in England is that Russell and Moore savaged James's theory, and that pragmatism (...) has never fully recovered. An alternative, and underappreciated, story is told here. The brilliant Cambridge mathematician, philosopher and economist, Frank Ramsey, was in the mid-1920s heavily influenced by the almost-unheard-of Peirce and was developing a pragmatist position of great promise. He then transmitted that pragmatism to his friend Wittgenstein, although had Ramsey lived past the age of 26 to see what Wittgenstein did with that position, Ramsey would not have liked what he saw. (shrink)

In the decade between Elizabeth Anscombe’s arrival in Cambridge in 1942 and Wittgenstein’s death in 1951 she became in turn a student, a friend, and then a chosen translator of his work. His choice of her as translator and literary heir speaks for itself, but it is not widely appreciated that the position she came to occupy contrasted with aspects of his Cambridge life prior to her taking up a research studentship at Newnham College. Anscombe came to (...) be a profound and original philosopher. Perhaps Wittgenstein’s engagement with her presupposed an inkling of her qualitative gifts later attested to by Donald Davidson, who estimated her short monograph Intention to be “the most important treatment of action since Aristotle.” It is impressive that while living amid the throes of WWII, giving birth to a large family, often engaging with forces surrounding Wittgenstein, and holding her own with him, she was simultaneously crafting her own philosophical progress. Twenty years after his death she was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge that he had occupied when they first met. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the lectures on the philosophy of mathematics delivered by Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1939. Only a relatively small number of lectures are discussed, the emphasis falling on understanding Wittgenstein’s views on the most important element of the logicist legacy of Frege and Russell, the definition of number in terms of classes—and, more specifically, by employing the notion of one-to-one correspondence. Since it is clear that Wittgenstein was not satisfied with this definition, the (...) aim of the essay is to propose a reading of the lectures able to clarify why that was the case. This reading shows that his better known views on language and mind expressed in Philosophical Investigations illuminate his conception of mathematics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein ed. by Hans Sluga, David G. SternDouglas G. WinbladHans Sluga and David G. Stern, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 509. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $18.95.There is a disconcerting lack of agreement about how to interpret Wittgenstein’s texts. The introduction and fourteen essays in this book are cases in (...) point. Stern claims that the phenomenon is due largely to the fact that Wittgenstein’s writings call for a radical change in philosophical sensibility, a change to which there continues to be considerable resistance. He also notes that most of Wittgenstein’s posthumous publications are the result of massive editorial interventions, and that much of his work remains unpublished. The electronic edition of the entire Nachlass, Stern argues, will reveal that Wittgenstein’s writings as a whole constitute a highly interconnected network of remarks—a hypertext. In a similar vein, Sluga suggests that Wittgenstein’s philosophical trajectory reflects the larger cultural shift in this century from modernism to postmodernism. The postmodern, hypertextual aspect of Wittgenstein’s thinking is nowhere better embodied here than in Cavell’s reflections on the importance of context in deciding whether some behavior counts as language use. Cavell’s remarks reproduce and comment on his own lectures on the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations, sections he reads as a commentary on a passage in Augustine.A closely related theme in the essays concerns the status of Wittgenstein’s attempt to avoid replacing older philosophical theories with new ones. Garver maintains that Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar provides a powerful rebuke to speculative or scientific metaphysics, but not to descriptive metaphysics. Glock argues in turn that Wittgenstein’s distinction between grammatical and empirical propositions does not fall prey to Quine’s attack on analyticity. One wonders whether this distinction is purely descriptive. And even if one grants Glock’s claim that grammatical rules are unfalsifiable, how does one decide whether a particular remark about these rules is mistaken? We cannot pass judgment on what for Garver is Wittgenstein’s genuinely critical enterprise without addressing these issues.Doing so also requires us to assess Wittgenstein’s closely related treatment of rule following. Stroud rejects Kripke’s account of this material, claiming that what the relevant passages actually show is that that no explanation of how language in general—and meaning and normativity in particular—is possible. Stroud holds that this conclusion can be felt as dissatisfying. But is it a theoretical conclusion? And why not find it liberating, as Wittgenstein apparently did?Fogelin also emphasizes Wittgenstein’s antitheoretical animus, taking issue with Dummett’s view that Wittgenstein is advancing a use theory of meaning and an antirealist philosophy of mathematics. Like Fogelin, Gerrard challenges Dummett’s view of Wittgenstein’s treatment of mathematics, insisting that for Wittgenstein, truth is not a matter of human agreement. But Gerrard does not tell us what Wittgenstein believes truth is. The question whether there is anything he thinks it is deserves further attention.Some contributors impute to the later Wittgenstein what are clearly theoretical [End Page 643] stances. Bloor argues that what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s linguistic idealism arises from certain sociological assumptions. And Kober attributes a “collective-linguistic idealism” to Wittgenstein on the grounds that the latter thinks that the truth conditions of a sentence depend on, or are part of, its utterance conditions. But, as several of the other essays make clear, it is debatable whether Wittgenstein would agree.A few authors discuss in detail the nature of philosophical theorizing in the early Wittgenstein. Summerfield offers an interpretation of what she takes to be the theory of representation in the Tractatus. She allows, however, that Wittgenstein tells us that one cannot represent the connection between a name and its referent. Ricketts, on the other hand, stresses that the so-called picture theory appears to imply that there can be no such theory. Yet his reading does not abandon the conception of truth as agreement with reality. It is unclear to me that this conception survives the implosion of the text as a whole. Why not kick the entire ladder away... (shrink)

Spanning the period between Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929 and the first version of Philosophical Investigations in 1936, Piotr Dehnel explores the middle stage in Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical development and identifies the major issues which engrossed him, including phenomenology, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of language. Contrary to the dominant perspective, Dehnel argues that this period was intrinsically different from the early and late stages and should not be viewed as a mere transitional phase. The distinctiveness (...) of Wittgenstein's middle work can be seen in his philosophical thinking as it unfolds in a non-linear trajectory: thoughts do not follow upon each other, ideas do not appear sequentially one by one, and insights do not form a straight chain. Dehnel portrays the diffused and multifarious quality of Wittgenstein's middle thinking, enabling readers to form a more comprehensive view of his entire philosophy and acquire a better grasp of his conceptual trajectory, complete with the intricacies and challenges that it poses. (shrink)

The discovery, in various quarters, of hitherto unknown letters exchanged between Wittgenstein and the chief of his Cambridge friends provides the basis for this new and profoundly revealing collection. Wittgenstein appears in turn shy and affectionate, fierce and censorious, happy to collaborate and sure of his own judgement. Four quarrels and four reconciliations are documented. Wittgenstein's struggles to publish his Tractatus may be followed, as well as his retreat from the world, his being wooed back to (...) philosophy by Keynes and Ramsey, and his plans to leave philosophy. The accompanying editorial notes are based on archival material not previously explored. Taken together, the correspondence provides an intriguing insight into Wittgenstein's life and thought, and will be essential reading for students and scholars. (shrink)

Original research on Wittgenstein's period in Cambridge, from 1929; his time with Francis Skinner; his visit to Russia, and World War 2, utlizing some uninvestigated manuscripts dictated by Wittgenstein, including a critique of Kreisal's misuse of Wittgenstein's writing on mathematical philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s Whewell’s Court Lectures contains previously unpublished notes from lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein between 1938 and 1941. The volume offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein’s thought and includes some of the finest examples of Wittgenstein’s lectures in regard to both content and reliability.

Wittgenstein’s writings and lectures during the first half of the 1930s play a crucial role in any interpretation of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations . G. E. Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures, 1930-1933, offer us a remarkably careful and conscientious record of what Wittgenstein said at the time, and are much more detailed and reliable than previously published notes from those lectures. The co-authors are currently editing these notes of Wittgenstein’s (...) lectures for a book to be published by Cambridge University Press. We describe the materials that make up Moore’s notes, explain their unique value, review the principal editorial challenges that these materials present, and provide a brief outline of our editorial project. (shrink)

For several terms at Cambridge in 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on the philosophical foundations of mathematics. A lecture class taught by Wittgenstein, however, hardly resembled a lecture. He sat on a chair in the middle of the room, with some of the class sitting in chairs, some on the floor. He never used notes. He paused frequently, sometimes for several minutes, while he puzzled out a problem. He often asked his listeners questions and reacted to their replies. (...) Many meetings were largely conversation. These lectures were attended by, among others, D. A. T. Gasking, J. N. Findlay, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing, G. H. von Wright, R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book. The lectures covered such topics as the nature of mathematics, the distinctions between mathematical and everyday languages, the truth of mathematical propositions, consistency and contradiction in formal systems, the logicism of Frege and Russell, Platonism, identity, negation, and necessary truth. The mathematical examples used are nearly always elementary. (shrink)

The paper seeks to interpret and then to criticize Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus paragraph 6.4 to 7, connecting this so-called mystical section with the “Lecture on Ethics” given in Cambridge in 1929, the Notebooks, and a passage in the Big Typescript. Interpretive and critical efforts focus on the claims: that if having intrinsic value, good or evil, is nothing zufällig, then its basis is nothing in the world; that value can only enter through the willing subject; that “how things (...) are in the world is a matter of indifference for what is higher”. Concerning, it is proposed that the zufällig is here that which simply or merely happens. The argument for rests on Wittgenstein's misconception of the categorical. It is remarked that and result in a philosophy of life that is unliveable. Witness the travails of Wittgenstein's own life and his struggle to “get over a particular fact”. Finally will even undermine, which is in any case fatally ambiguous. In conclusion, it is suggested that both the stresses and strains that are induced within the Tractatus itself by its circumscription of the sayable and the difficulties of can be overcome within Wittgenstein's later philosophy, but in ways already prefigured in the doctrine of “showing” as that appears in both Tractatus and “Lecture on Ethics”. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889, son of parents of Jewish extraction but not Jewish religion. Asked how his family came by the name ‘Wittgenstein’ Ludwig said they had been court Jews to the princely family and so had taken the name when Jews were required by law to have European-style names. The father, Karl, was a Protestant, the mother a Catholic. The Jewish blood was sufficient to bring the family later on into danger under Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. (...) They did not think of themselves as Jews or belong to the Jewish community in Vienna. The children were brought up sort-of Catholic though so far as I know only the eldest, Hermine, towards the end of her life, took this seriously and made a profession of faith before friends and household. At 9 years of age Ludwig and Paul, a year or two older than Ludwig, talked together and decided that their religion was all nonsense. Paul became a pianist of some fame, but soon after his debut in Vienna he became a wounded prisoner on the Russian front and his arm was lopped off by a surgeon who did not know he was a pianist. (shrink)