Abstract
The historical record concerning Wittgenstein was significantly augmented in June 1988, when around five hundred letters to him, from a variety of correspondents—including Georg Trakl, Bertrand Russell, and many others—were discovered in the store room of a real-estate broker in Vienna. The woman who had been ordered to dispose of the old papers noticed the name “Wittgenstein” and stopped to examine them just before they were shredded.2 Among this trove, now housed at the Brenner Archives at the University of Innsbruck, were twenty-one letters from Frege to Wittgenstein. The first is dated 11 October 1914, the last 3 April 1920. These form the entire correspondence between them that is presently known still to exist.
1I am pleased to thank members of the Boston University Editorial Studies program seminar, 2005, under the auspices of Archie Burnett and Frances Whistler, as well as Gisela Bengtsson, Enzo De Pellegrin, Mirja Hartimo, Malek Husseini, Allan Janik, Akihiro Kanamori, Wolfgang Kienzler, Andrew Lugg, Brian McGuinness, Jennifer Page, R. D. Schindler, Richard Schmitt, Peter Simons, Christian Thiel, and W.V. Quine for their helpful suggestions and encouragement on the translation. Kienzler provided substantial scholarly help, both with detailed comments on the transcription of the original German text and with his many very helpful suggestions for improving accuracy of the translation. Janik supplied me with continual encouragement, as well as with photocopies of the original letters and preprints of his editorial work now largely published in the electronic edition of Wittgenstein’s correspondence. Last but certainly not least, Dr. De Pellegrin has been an unfailingly generous and acute editor of the translation at each stage of its preparation, offering many insightful suggestions about the scholarly presentation of the material.
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- 1.
Reinhard Merkel, “Du wirst am Ende verstanden werden”, Die Zeit, Dossier, No. 18, 28 April 1989, p. 13.
- 2.
The evidence for this is not absolutely conclusive, according to Kai F. Wehmeier and Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch; see their “The Quest for Frege’s Nachlass”, in M. Beaney and E. Reck, eds., Gottlob Frege: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. I Frege’s Philosophy in Context (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 54–68 for an argument that it is just possible that further material might turn up.
- 3.
Scholz (1884–1956) was a logician, philosopher and theologian. Made Professor of Theology in Breslau (1917), and of Philosophy in Kiel (1919) and later Münster (1928), he founded the first Institute of Logic and Mathematics in Münster, where the Frege Archiv is still housed.
- 4.
Scholz’s papers are in the Scholz Archive at the University of Münster (see www.math.uni-muenster.de/math/inst/logik); correspondence and notes concerning the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence are in the Frege-Archive at the University of Münster. A detailed history of Frege’s papers is given in Albert Veraart, “Geschichte des wissenschaftlichen Nachlasses Gottlob Freges und seiner Edition. Mit einem Katalog des ursprünglichen Bestands der nachgelassenen Schriften Freges”, in Matthias Schirn, ed., Studies on Frege I: Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics/Studien zu Frege I: Logik und Philosophie der Mathematik (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, 1976), pp. 49–106 and is also reviewed in the Preface to Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, ed. B. McGuinness, trans. Hans Kaal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press/Oxford: Blackwells, 1980), a partial translation of vol. II of Gottlob Frege, Nachgelassene Schriften und Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, eds. G. Gabriel et al. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976). As Veraart explains (p. 67), Scholz made three slightly differing annotated lists describing Frege’s correspondence, known to scholars as the “Scholz Lists” 1, 2 and 3.
- 5.
As mentioned in the chronology below, there were letters from Wittgenstein’s sister Hermine to Frege; I presume the originals were destroyed in the bombing of the Münster library. Copies survived, published now with the range of correspondence between Hermine and Ludwig on the Intelex CD-rom of Wittgenstein’s collected correspondence (see footnote 9 below). See also Wittgenstein Familienbriefe, eds. B. McGuinness, M. C. Ascher, O. Pfersmann, Schriftenreihe der Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft, vol. 23 (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky Verlag, 1996) and, for a discussion of their bearing on issues surrounding the identification of pre-Tractatus manuscripts and notebooks, Brian McGuinness, “Some Pre-Tractatus Manuscripts”, in his Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 259–269. The letters from Hermine to Frege concerned Hermine’s role as an intermediary between her brother and Frege in arranging to mail the manuscript of the Tractatus to Frege at the end of the war, as well as her role as an organizer of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts. In the chronology of the correspondence below I make note of these letters, but have not translated them in what follows, as they shed no substantial light on the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence.
- 6.
This is pointed out by R. Schmitt, in his introduction to his translation of the final four letters from Frege to Wittgenstein; see note 11 below.
- 7.
The latter two letters are presently housed in the Frege Archive at the University of Münster.
- 8.
CD-ROM, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel (Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe 2004), eds. Monika Seekircher, Brian McGuinness, Anton Unterkircher, Allan Janik and Walter Methlagl.
- 9.
The German letters from Frege to Wittgenstein were first published in an issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien, vol. 33/34, Wittgenstein in Focus—Im Brennpunkt: Wittgenstein, eds. Brian McGuinness and Rudolf Haller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 5–33, but since that time editorial scrutiny of the original documents has led scholars to change the date on one of the postcards and to slightly alter some of the German wording, in part thanks to Dr. De Pellegrin’s able scrutiny of the original German handwriting. Wittgenstein’s reply to Scholz was first published in Veraart (op. cit.), p. 106, and excerpted from in Gabriel, et al., ed., Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel (op. cit.), p. 265.
- 10.
See Juliet Floyd, “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in the Tractatus” in L. Rouner, eds., Loneliness (Notre Dame: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, 1998), pp. 79–108. The commentary provided in this essay is purely philosophical, and directed solely at the topic mentioned in the essay’s title. Another, independent translation of just these four letters was prepared by Richard Schmitt and recently published as “Frege’s Letters to Wittgenstein about the Tractatus,” Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly 120 (Nov. 2003): 13–31.
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Floyd, J. (2011). Prefatory Note to the Frege-Wittgenstein Correspondence. In: De Pellegrin, E. (eds) Interactive Wittgenstein. Synthese Library, vol 349. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9909-0_1
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