This work brings in both the original German and English translation of over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind of historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930's. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932-35, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann, but also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann closely based on the dictations. Many of these texts become the ultimate (...) sources of material on philosophy of language that constitutes the bulk of Waismann's book Logic, Sprache, Philosophy. The transcriptions throw light on the development of Wittgenstein's thought in this period and some of the topics are not covered in any of the existing publications of his writings, in particular his detailed attention to causal theories of meaning. They also contain texts covering psychological concepts such as expecting, intending and experience; these have no counterparts in Waismann's publications. (shrink)

This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de siecle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in (...) a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein s native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems .This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful. New York Times Book Review.". (shrink)

Fin de siecle Vienna was once memorably described by Karl Kraus as a "proving ground for the destruction of the world." In the decades leading to the World War that brought down the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city was at once an operetta dream world masking social and political problems and tension, as well as a center for the far-reaching explorations and innovations in music, art, science, and philosophy that would help to define modernity. One of the most powerful critiques (...) of the retreat into fantasy was that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early career in Vienna has helped frame debates about ethical and aesthetic values in culture. In Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Allan Janik expands upon his work Wittgenstein's Vienna (co-authored with Stephen Toulmin) to amplify a number of significant points concerning the genesis of Wittgenstein's thought, the nature of Viennese culture, and criticism of contemporary culture. Although Wittgenstein is the central figure in this volume, Janik places considerable emphasis on other influential figures, both Viennese and non-Viennese, in order to break down some of the persistent stereotypes about the philosopher and his surrounding culture, especially the myths of "carefree" Vienna and Wittgenstein the positivist. The persistence of these myths, in Janik's view, stems in part from the inability of many historians to differentiate past from present in the evaluation of intellectual currents. Janik reviews a number of figures overlooked in assessing Wittgenstein: Otto Weininger, Kraus, Schoenberg, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, Offenbach, and Georg Trakl. All of these, Janik demonstrates, are absolutely necessary to understand what was at stake in the debates on aestheticism and the critique of a modern culture. Wittgenstein's efforts to recognize the limits of thought and language and thus to be fair to science, religion, and art account for his place of honor among critical modernists. These essays elucidate Wittgenstein's perspective on our culture. (shrink)

"Wittgenstein in Vienna" documents Wittgenstein's life in the city: the places he, his family and those with whom he was in contact, lived, worked, entertained and socialized. The book will be a source of enrichment to the cultural tourist in Vienna. Its authors are authorities on Wittgenstein's philosophy especially in relation to Viennese culture and popular culture, in particular the world of the coffee house and cabaret.

In this interview, Tomasz Zarębski speaks with Allan Janik, co-author of _Wittgenstein’s Vienna_ (1973, with Stephen Toulmin), on the occasion of the 50 th anniversary of the publication of this pathbreaking book. The conversation concerns the circumstances, motivations and reasons for his undertaking the work on the book, as well as its reception and place in Wittgenstein scholarship. A large part of the discussion refers to his perspective of Wittgenstein, Toulmin’s philosophical writings, and Janik’s own vision of philosophy. The interview (...) took place in Innsbruck on 23 rd and 25 th August 2023. (shrink)

Originally conceived as a forty-page conclusion to Hacker’s twenty years of work on the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, this book “rapidly assumed a life of its own”. A major contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, this substantial volume delivers even more than the title promises. The eight chapters are best approached as a six-chapter book, itself some 220 pages long, on Wittgenstein’s contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, followed by a two-chapter, 120-page epilogue about how and why (...) his influence has waned. The first six chapters provide an encyclopedic summary of the fruits of Hacker’s research on Wittgenstein’s writing, an immensely learned account of British philosophy from the turn of the century to the 1970s, and a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s reception by Oxford, Cambridge, and the Vienna Circle. The book’s closing chapters, “Post-positivism in the United States and Quine’s Apostasy” and “The Decline of Analytic Philosophy,” polemically argue that Quine’s philosophy, and the post-Quinean naturalism prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy today, amount to such a decisive break with the analytic tradition, as Hacker conceives of it, that they should not be counted as “analytic.”. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus with the injunction, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." As the concluding proposition of a tersely written, tightly organized work, the reader would expect it to have a strong bite. Yet the statement has been variously ignored, dismissed, and misunderstood, interpreted as the inspired words of a mystic or as the final banishing of metaphysics from philosophical discourse. It is with the help of Janik and Toulmin’s work that it becomes (...) clear how the proposition serves as the crown to a book which Wittgenstein maintained was primarily an ethical work. In presenting the Viennese Weltanshauung [[sic]] of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there emerges the picture of a society where appearances ruled in all areas of cultural life, in the government, and in the arts. Viennese society was characterized by a vast impotent bureaucracy, the Strauss waltz, and the feutillion. The leader in the inevitable reaction was Karl Kraus. He instigated a critique of Viennese society through an ingenious and refined use of cultural modes of expression. Along with him, leaders emerged for each of the special arts, language, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, who, in their own particular role, tried to restore truth and responsibility to the affairs of men. The development of the characters and the issues involved make this book important. Of lesser value, unfortunately, are the chapters dealing specifically with the work of Wittgenstein, who is represented as one of the emergent leaders. Although we are rhetorically persuaded that his talk of "simples," "representation," "depicting," or "language games" is tied up with the critique of a fundamentally sophistical intellectualism, we are not led on to seeing how the critique was carried out.—W. A. F. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus with the injunction, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." As the concluding proposition of a tersely written, tightly organized work, the reader would expect it to have a strong bite. Yet the statement has been variously ignored, dismissed, and misunderstood, interpreted as the inspired words of a mystic or as the final banishing of metaphysics from philosophical discourse. It is with the help of Janik and Toulmin’s work that it becomes (...) clear how the proposition serves as the crown to a book which Wittgenstein maintained was primarily an ethical work. In presenting the Viennese Weltanshauung [[sic]] of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there emerges the picture of a society where appearances ruled in all areas of cultural life, in the government, and in the arts. Viennese society was characterized by a vast impotent bureaucracy, the Strauss waltz, and the feutillion. The leader in the inevitable reaction was Karl Kraus. He instigated a critique of Viennese society through an ingenious and refined use of cultural modes of expression. Along with him, leaders emerged for each of the special arts, language, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, who, in their own particular role, tried to restore truth and responsibility to the affairs of men. The development of the characters and the issues involved make this book important. Of lesser value, unfortunately, are the chapters dealing specifically with the work of Wittgenstein, who is represented as one of the emergent leaders. Although we are rhetorically persuaded that his talk of "simples," "representation," "depicting," or "language games" is tied up with the critique of a fundamentally sophistical intellectualism, we are not led on to seeing how the critique was carried out.—W. A. F. (shrink)

The Voices of Wittgenstein brings for the first time, in both the original German and in English translation, over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind. This text is of key historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930's. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932 to 1935, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann. It also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann, (...) closely based on these dictations. (shrink)

The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut (...) positions to Wittgenstein and his interlocutors, it is very easy to read back our current understanding of familiar distinctions into a time when those terms were used in a much more open-ended way. The paper aims to to provide a broader perspective on this debate, starting from the protagonists’ understanding of their respective positions. Too often, the programmatic statements about the nature of their work that are repeated in manifestoes, introductions, and elementary textbooks have occupied center stage in the subsequent secondary literature. Consequently, I focus on a detailed examination of a turning point in their relationship. That turning point is Wittgenstein's charge, in the summer of 1932, that a recently published paper of Carnap's, "Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science", made such extensive and unacknowledged use of Wittgenstein's own ideas that Wittgenstein would, as he put it in a letter to Schlick, "soon be in a situation where my own work shall be considered merely as a reheated version or plagiarism of Carnap’s." While the leading parties in this dispute shared a basic commitment to the primacy of physicalistic language, and the view that all significant languages are translatable, there was a remarkable lack of mutual understanding between them, and deep disagreement about the nature of the doctrines they disputed. Three quarters of a century later, we are so much more conscious of the differences that separated them than the points on which they agreed that it takes an effort of historical reconstruction to appreciate why Wittgenstein once feared that his own work would be regarded as a pale shadow of Carnap’s. (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)

_The Voices of Wittgenstein_ brings for the first time, in both the original German and in English translation, over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind. This text is of key historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930's. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932 to 1935, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann. It also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann, (...) closely based on these dictations. (shrink)

_The Voices of Wittgenstein_ brings for the first time, in both the original German and in English translation, over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind. This text is of key historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930's. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932 to 1935, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann. It also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann, (...) closely based on these dictations. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Folly: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Language Games presents a dialogue between the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the author Françoise Davoine, and Davoine's patients with extreme lived experience. The book begins with Davoine's seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, which is attended by Wittgenstein. He then accompanies Davoine on visits to colleagues at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts, in California, on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, and at Freud's house in Vienna. The (...) dialogic form of the book allows a performance centered on the psychotherapy of madness and trauma, in which Wittgenstein takes the floor. Davoine introduces us to a contemporary Feast of Fools and creates new language games with madness, enlarging the scope of psychoanalytic approaches to authors like Wittgenstein. The chapters of this book closely resemble short plays in which a conversation with living human beings or with characters from philosophy, literature, science, and the arts encounter one another and begin to open new ways of speaking that can render the "mad" more familiar and more manageable. Wittgenstein's Folly: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Language Games will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to academics and students engaged in psychoanalytic studies, philosophy and trauma-related studies. (shrink)

Wittgenstein finished part 1 of the Philosophical Investigations in the spring of 1945. From 1946 to 1949 he worked on the philosophy of psychology almost without interruption. The present two-volume work comprises many of his writings over this period. Some of the remarks contained here were culled for part 2 of the Investigations ; others were set aside and appear in the collection known as Zettel . The great majority, however, although of excellent quality, have hitherto remained unpublished. This bilingual (...) edition of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology presents the first English translation of an essential body of Wittegenstein's work. It elaborates Wittgenstein's views on psychological concepts such as expectation, sensation, knowing how to follow a rule, and knowledge of the sensations of other persons. It also shows strong emphasis on the "anthropological" aspect of Wittgenstein's thought. Philosophers, as well as anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will welcome this important publication. (shrink)

We will discuss a mathematical proof found in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, a constructive version of Euler’s proof of the infinity of prime numbers. Although it does not amount to much, this proof allows us to see that Wittgenstein had at least some mathematical skills. At the very last, the proof shows that Wittgenstein was concerned with mathematical practice and it also gives further evidence in support of the claim that, after all, he held a constructivist stance, at least during the transitional (...) period of his thought (1929-33). (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

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)

There are many important questions still unresolved concerning the philosophical and personal relations between Ludwig Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle, and there are also current views on those relationships that do not bear closer scrutiny. For instance, in the last few decades, it has been fashionable to emphasize the differences between the philosophical views of Ludwig Wittgenstein and those of the members of the Vienna Circle. It has even been suggested that the members of the (...) Vienna Circle misunderstood or otherwise misinterpreted Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. For instance, in a recent book we find the statement that the “members of the so-called Vienna Circle ... had founded logical positivism partly on a deep misunderstanding of the Tractatus”. (shrink)

What is essential to language? Two thinkers active in Vienna in the 1930's, Karl Bühler and Ludwig Wittgenstein, gave apparently incompatible answers to this question. I compare what Wittgenstein says about language and reference at the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations with some aspects of the descriptive analysis of language worked out by Bühler between 1907 and 1934, a systematic development of the philosophies of mind and language of such heirs of Brentano as Martinak, Marty, Meinong, Landgrebe and Husserl. (...) Y a-Uil quelque chose qui est essentiel au langage? Deux penseurs actifs à Vienne dans les années trente, Karl Bühler et Ludwig Wittgenstein, donnent à cette question des réponses qui sont apparemment incompatibles. Je compare ce que Wittgenstein dit du langage et de la référence au début de ses Investigations Philosophiques avec quelques aspects de l'analyse descriptive élaborée par Bühler entre 1907 et 1934, un développement systématique des philosophies de l'esprit et du langage des héritiers de Brentano tels que Martinak, Marty, Meinong, Landgrebe et Husserl. (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)

The question is raised of the source of the extreme verificationist views which Wittgenstein put forward immediately after his return to philosophy in 1929. Since these views appear to be radically different from the ideas put forward in theTractatus some explanation of this dramatic new turn in Wittgenstein''s thought certainly seems to be called for. Wittgenstein''s very low level of interest in philosophy between 1918 and shortly before his return to philosophy is documented. Attention then focuses on the crucial period (...) immediately before Wittgenstein''s return to Cambridge, and it is shown that in this period he encountered only two new philosophical influences. These were the ideas of Brouwer and the ideas of the Vienna Circle. Each of these is examined and neither is found capable of providing an explanation of the source of Wittgenstein''s verificationism. This leads to a reconsideration of the underlying assumption that Wittgenstein''s verificationism does represent the radical departure from the ideas of theTractatus which it appears to. It is argued that the only way we can account for Wittgenstein''s evident approval of the reading of theTractatus which he must have encountered in his meetings with members of the Vienna Circle is by concluding that, far from being incompatible with his earlier ideas, some form of verificationism must always have been implicit in theTractatus. (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)

This bilingual volume—English and German on facing pages—brings together the writings Wittgenstein composed during his stay in Dublin between October 1948 and March 1949, one of his most fruitful periods. He later drew more than half of his remarks for Part II of Philosophical Investigations from this Dublin manuscript. A direct continuation of the writing that makes up the two volumes of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, this collection offers scholars a glimpse of Wittgenstein's preliminary thinking on one (...) of his most important works. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman both teach at the University of Helsinki. (shrink)

This popular selection of Wittgenstein’s key writings has now been updated to include new material relevant to recent debates about the philosopher. Follows the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus through to the Philosophical Investigations. Excerpts are arranged by topic and introduce readers to all the central concerns of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Now includes a new chapter on ‘Sense, Nonsense and Philosophy’ incorporating material relevant to recent debates about Wittgenstein.

The topic of the philosophical relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle is of considerable interest both to interpreters of the work of Wittgenstein and of the Circle. Answers to questions concerning the nature and extent of the influences between them have long been thought to inform the systematic understanding of the philosophies involved. Importantly, the knowledge of the relation between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle has an interesting history of its own, reflecting in part the perceived (...) relative standing of the two parties; each of whom, after all, prescribed a radical reorientation of philosophy as traditionally practiced. This chapter presents the historical facts against which the philosophical relations between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle have to be assessed and gives an overview of the Circle's reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Important corollaries follow for the assessment of the Circle's Tractatus reception. (shrink)

David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics yields a quantum potential, Q. In his early work, the effects of Q are understood in causal terms as acting through a real (quantum) field which pushes particles around. In his later work (with Basil Hiley), the causal understanding of Q appears to have been abandoned. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the use of certain metaphors leads Bohm away from a causal treatment of Q, and to evaluate the use of (...) those metaphors. (shrink)

Between 1937 and 1951 Wittgenstein had numerous philosophical conversations with his student and close friend, Rush Rhees. This article is composed of Rhees’s notes of twenty such conversations — namely, all those which have not yet been published — as well as some supplements from Rhees’s correspondence and miscellaneous notes. The principal value of the notes collected here is that they fill some interesting and important gaps in Wittgenstein ’s corpus. Thus, firstly, the notes touch on a wide range of (...) subjects, a number of which are only briefly addressed by Wittgenstein elsewhere, if at all. The subjects discussed include: explanation, ethics, anarchism, contradiction, psychoanalysis, colour, religion, concepts, classification, seeing-as, evolution, the relation between science and philosophy, and free will, amongst others. Secondly, the notes contain references to, and brief remarks about, philosophers of whom Wittgenstein otherwise says very little, if anything — such as Brentano, Heidegger, Aquinas, and Marx, amongst others. And thirdly, the notes provide us with valuable examples of Wittgenstein ’s use of some key ‘Wittgensteinian’ terms of art which are surprisingly rare in his written works, such as ‘surface-’ and ‘depth-grammar’, and ‘centres of variation’. (shrink)

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

This paper sketches the place of Arthur Pap’s work in the complex history of modality in the analytic tradition of philosophy, contrasting it with that of the early Wittgenstein. They represent two principal paths of the philosophical history of modality that converge in the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Clarifying these paths go some way towards turning aside a myth, with some sway in contemporary philosophy, which occludes a philosophically fruitful view of the philosophical-historical realities of modality in (...) analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This essay examines the role allocated to ostensive definition in the logical empiricist philosophy of the vienna circle. it explains how this characteristic array of doctrines grew out of reflections on the "tractatus". the various theses are distinguished into general principles, logical aspects, normative aspects and psychological theses. a detailed survey of wittgenstein's later analysis of ostensive definition is undertaken. this is then brought to bear on the doctrines of logical empiricism to show that they are incoherent. the (...) essay concludes by sketching out how much of those fallacious doctrines survive explicitly in contemporary philosophy of language. (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.

System Requirements System requirements Minimum 80486, 66MHz IBM PC or full compatible ; Minimum 16MB RAM 177MB hard disk space to store and run the Nachlass, an extra 12MB in addition to this should be available during installation. SVGA monitor set to 800x600 pixels, 16-bit colour, or higher setting recommended to use and display the transcription text and facsimiles; Quad-speed CD-ROM drive or higher; Windows 3.1, 3.11; Windows 95/98; Windows NT 4.0; Windows 2000. Microsoft mouse or compatible Network versions Windows (...) NT 4, and Novell networks. Customers with Wide Area Networks should ring Customer Services to discuss specific requirements. Customer Service Contact: Customer Services, Electronic Publishing Tel: +44 1865 267979 Fax: +44 1865 267990 Email: [email protected]. (shrink)

This book offers a critical update of current Wittgenstein research on the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (TLP) and its relation to the Vienna Circle. The contributions are written by renowned Wittgenstein scholars, on the occasion of the "Wittgenstein Years" 1921/1922 with a special focus on its origin, reception, and interpretation then and now. The main topic is the mutual relation between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (esp. Schlick, Waismann, Carnap, Gödel), but also Russell and Ramsey. In addition, included in this (...) volume are new studies on Wittgenstein's life and work, on the philosophy of the TLP, and on the Wittgenstein family in philosophical and historical context. Furthermore, unpublished documents on Wittgenstein and Waismann from the archives are provided in form of edited and commented primary sources. As per the book series' usual format, a general part of this Yearbook covers a study on Neurath's economy as well as reviews of related publications. (shrink)

In the Vienna Circle archives in Haarlem, NL, there are a great number of protocols connected with Moritz Schlick’s philosophical chair – manuscripts, typescripts and shorthand manuscripts. They contain extensive and detailed information about Schlick’s seminars and also about the elementary seminars, so-called proseminars, which were held, as the documents explain: “bei Prof. Schlick”, but actually after 1929 not by him. Since his arrival in Vienna, Schlick was responsible for these both types of seminars and they were under (...) his supervision. They are documented mainly by students. The different participants had the task of producing a handwritten report of the meeting, later also typescripts. It is not mentioned in the protocols who was responsible for the elementary seminars. The professor was the person who mattered. It is interesting to observe that while Schlick’s seminars mainly contained descriptions of chapters in philosophical books, the proseminars were more ambitious. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's treatment of number words and arithmetic in the Tractatus reflects central features of his early conception of philosophy. In rejecting Frege's and Russell's analyses of number, Wittgenstein rejects their respective conceptions of function, object, logical form, generality, sentence, and thought. He, thereby, surrenders their shared ideal of the clarity a Begriffsschrift could bring to philosophy. The development of early analytic philosophy thus evinces far less continuity than some readers of Wittgenstein, from Russell and the Vienna positivists to (...) many contemporary readers of the Tractatus, have supposed. (shrink)