Abstract
Twenty-one cards and letters from Frege to Wittgenstein—the totality of the correspondence between them presently known to exist—were discovered in 1988, long after elaborate and far-reaching interpretive traditions had grown up around each philosopher.1 It is unlikely that these missives will of themselves radically reshape our understanding of either. But for historians of logic and analytic philosophy, as well as for anyone interested in German and Austrian intellectual history at the time of the First World War—and especially Wittgenstein’s and Frege’s places within it—these are significant and interesting documents.
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- 1.
The letters from Frege to Wittgenstein were first published in an issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien as “Gottlob Frege: Briefe an Ludwig Wittgenstein”, eds. A. Janik and P. Berger, in vol. 33/34, Wittgenstein in Focus — Im Brennpunkt: Wittgenstein, eds. Brian McGuinness and Rudolf Haller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 5–33, and again, with editorial revisions and commentary, in the CD-ROM of Wittgenstein’s complete known correspondence distributed by Intelex, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel (Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe 2004), eds. Monika Seekircher, Brian McGuinness and Anton Unterkircher. They are translated in this volume; see the preface to this translation for editorial commentary on their history.
- 2.
Frege received the manuscript via Wittgenstein’s sister Hermine in late 1918 or early 1919, but did not reply until 28 June 1919; see the Chronology in my Preface to the translation, as well as von Wright, “The Origin of the Tractatus”, p. 76 and related correspondence in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffa, eds. B. McGuinness and G.H. von Wright (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995). See also footnote 31 below.
- 3.
See Frege to Wittgenstein of 12 September and 15 October 1918, and 3 April 1920.
- 4.
G.H. von Wright analyzed this correspondence in detail before the discovery of the Frege letters in “The Origin of the Tractatus” (in his Wittgenstein. With letters from Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982/Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and also reprinted on the CD-ROM Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel). This essay remains essential reading for those interested in the origins and composition of the Tractatus. So too are the introduction to B. McGuinness and J. Schulte, eds., Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung/Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Kritische Edition (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989) and essays touching upon this topic in Brian McGuinness’s Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers (New York: Routledge, 2002). For Hermine’s comments on the relationship with Frege, see her “My Brother Ludwig”, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (New York: Oxford University Press, revised edition 1984), pp. 1–11, especially pp. 5–6. For Geach’s anecdote, see the Preface to Frege, Logical Investigations, ed. and trans. P.T. Geach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
- 5.
Lothar Kreiser, Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), p. 580.
- 6.
Reck, “Wittgenstein’s ‘Great Debt’ to Frege”, in Reck, ed., From Frege to Wittgenstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3–38 summarizes the biographical data and contains a discussion of the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence, as well as a few tentative suggestions about how we ought to be viewing the question of Frege’s influence on Wittgenstein.
- 7.
Lothar Kreiser, Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit, p. 580.
- 8.
Compare Hermine Wittgenstein, “My Brother Ludwig”, pp. 5–6.
- 9.
Introduction to “Gottlob Frege: Briefe an Ludwig Wittgenstein”, p. 7.
- 10.
See the 1 April 1932 list of figures who Wittgenstein said had most influenced him, at item 154, 16r in his Nachlass.
- 11.
Assembling Reminders: Studies in the Genesis of Wittgenstein’s Concept of Philosophy (Stockholm: Santérus Press, 2006).
- 12.
Cora Diamond, “Inheriting Frege: The Work of reception, as Wittgenstein did it”, forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein.
- 13.
Those in this tradition include Geach, Diamond, Hintikka, and Ricketts.
- 14.
For this view see Goldfarb, “Wittgenstein’s Understanding of Frege: The Pre-Tractarian Evidence”, in E. Reck, ed., From Frege to Wittgenstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 185–200.
- 15.
Brian McGuinness’s biography of Wittgenstein’s early life, Wittgenstein: A Life, Young Ludwig 1889–1921 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988) was published before the discovery of the letters; Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990) (especially at pp. 151ff., 174ff.) and Lothar Kreiser’s Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit were published afterwards, and do weave references to the letters into the discussion of their subjects, though without emphasizing the questions I am raising here.
- 16.
On the theme of biography and philosophy, see my review of J. Klagge, ed., Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2002.06.04) at http://ndpr.icaap.org/content/current/floyd-klagge.html. On the broader question of the historical contextualization of analytic philosophy, see my introduction, with S. Shieh, to J. Floyd and S. Shieh eds., Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 17.
I have included the Scholz-Wittgenstein exchange of letters from 1936 in the translation in this volume.
- 18.
Reference to a record of this meeting is contained in Scholz List 2, now in the Scholz Archiv at Münster (see my Preface to the translations, in this volume, for citations to this list).
- 19.
The 1902 exchange between Frege and Russell is translated in Jean van Heijenoort, ed., From Frege to Gödel: A Sourcebook in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 126–128, along with a stirring letter by Russell to van Heijenoort praising Frege’s intellectual honesty, dedication, and integrity. (Van Heijenoort evidently worked with copies of the original letters.)
- 20.
This was presumably because Scholz knew of the March 29, 1913 letter from Jourdain to Frege in which Jourdain says that he and Wittgenstein “were rather disturbed” by the idea that Frege might be writing a third volume of the Grundgesetze, and suggest a translation of earlier parts of the book into English instead. Frege approved the project in his reply (cf. Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, eds. G. Gabriel et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). As Reck notes (“Wittgenstein’s ‘Great Debt’ to Frege”, p. 12), this indicates, minimally, that Wittgenstein was interested enough in Frege’s work to contribute to its translation, and that Frege trusted Wittgenstein enough to approve of his involvement in this venture. (This translation project was not completed.)
- 21.
Wittgenstein to Schlick (18 September 1930); see Briefwechsel.
- 22.
It appeared in the first number of Erkenntnis vol. I (in 1930/1931): 4–11; for Schlick’s paper in English see Ayer, ed. Logical Positivism (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 53–59, especially p. 54.
- 23.
For more on the motto and its meaning, see David Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2004) and my “Homage to Vienna: Feyerabend on Wittgenstein (and Austin and Quine)”, in Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994): Ein Philosoph aus Wien, eds. K.R. Fischer and F. Stadler, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis, vol. 14 (Springer Verlag, 2006).
- 24.
It seems plausible to assume that the letters were being held for Wittgenstein alongside the other pieces of correspondence with which they were later discovered, by his arrangement or perhaps that of a member of the family acting as his representative. This particular collection of over 500 letters was large, and it seems unlikely Wittgenstein would have had it shipped to Cambridge with him. Because the circumstances surrounding the later discovery of the correspondence are so murky, however, we know next to nothing of the history of this collection of letters.
- 25.
Wittgenstein: A Life, Young Ludwig 1889–1921, p. 284.
- 26.
Remarks concerning the dangers both of vanity and of false humility in putting a philosophical work before the public find their way into the Preface to the Tractatus implicitly, but are made explicit in the Foreword to Philosophical Remarks and the Preface to Philosophical Investigations.
- 27.
Wittgenstein to Russell, 19 August 1919, 6 October 1919; see Briefwechsel and Cambridge Letters.
- 28.
Item 128, p. 51, from 1943, in the Nachlass.
- 29.
This is not the place to discuss Frege’s political views, which have been treated elsewhere by Kienzler, Kreiser, and Uwe-Dathe (see my footnote 2 to the translation of Frege’s 2 August 1916 letter in this volume). But an example of the kind of remark I have in mind (noted by Burton Dreben) is contained in Frege’s card to Wittgenstein of 28 August 1916, where Frege mentions with great trepidation the entry of Romania into the war. While Frege’s nervousness about this may be partly intended to express concern for Wittgenstein, who is fighting on the Eastern front, Frege fails in his letter to Wittgenstein of 26 April 1917 even to mention the entry of the United States into the war (on 6 April 1917), alluding instead to the successes of the U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic. Was this an underestimation (perhaps typical in Germany at the time) of the overwhelming role that was to be played by the emerging North American industrial power in the subsequent months of the war, or was it part of an effort to encourage Wittgenstein in the face of worrying news? Compare Monk’s remarks in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 151.
- 30.
Kreiser (Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit, p. 577) writes that Wittgenstein’s visit to Frege in 1911 was “a great encouragement” to Frege. Compare Frege’s letters to Wittgenstein of 1918.
- 31.
Lothar Kreiser canvasses possible connections between the delay in Frege’s reply to Wittgenstein after receiving the manuscript of the Tractatus and the practicalities of Frege’s life both in his biography of Frege (Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit) and in “Alfred”, in G. Gabriel and W. Kienzler eds., Frege in Jena: Beiträge zur Spurensicherung (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann GmbH, 1997), pp. 68–83.
- 32.
See Frege to Wittgenstein 12 April 1916, 2 August 1916, 28 June 1919. Kreiser discusses Frege’s weak nerves and at times fragile condition in Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit, pp. 513ff.
- 33.
See the letter from Frege to Wittgenstein of 9 April 1918, translated in this volume and in German on the CD-ROM Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel. The foreword was found at the end of the manuscript that has come to be known as the Prototractatus (MS 104 in von Wright’s catalog). For discussion of its status, see von Wright, “The Wittgenstein Papers” and “The Origin of the Tractatus”, both in his Wittgenstein. Compare McGuinness and Schulte’s introduction to their edition Ludwig Wittgenstein: Logische-philosophische Abhandlung/Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, Kritische Edition. On the gift’s significance for Frege’s financial situation, see Kreiser, Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit, pp. 497, 505–5, 569.
- 34.
Among others whom Wittgenstein supported (albeit anonymously, through Ficker) were Karl Kraus, and the poets Rilke and Trakl. Their correspondence with him (after learning of his support) were discovered alongside the Frege-Wittgenstein letters, and might therefore usefully be compared with Frege’s to him. (They are on the CD-ROM Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel (Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe 2004).) Note that support of intellectuals and artists was not the only kind of charitable giving in which Wittgenstein engaged during this period of his life. McGuinness reports that according to Wittgenstein’s sister Hermine, around late 1916 or 1917 Ludwig gave 100,000 crowns for the purchase of better howitzer guns for the front (Wittgenstein: A Life, p. 257)—the gift of a soldier and an engineer, not merely an artist or humanitarian. Compare Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, pp. 106ff.
- 35.
Lothar Kreiser has said that without Wittgenstein’s gift Frege could not possibly have purchased a house and retired in his home town of Bad Kleinen, Mecklenburg; moreover, without that gift, by the end of the First World War Frege would have been living “on the threshold of poverty” (Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit, p. 566). Peter Geach’s report of Wittgenstein’s remarks about an early visit to Frege, in which Wittgenstein says he had heard that Frege was very poor (G.E.M. Anscombe and P. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), pp. 129–130, though relevant to the question of perceptions, may reflect Wittgenstein’s own privileged upbringing and youthful dandyism more than it does Frege’s actual financial situation in 1913. Compare the follow-up correspondence between Geach and Frege’s biographer Kreiser, quoted in Kreiser’s Gottlob Frege Leben-Werk-Zeit, p. 498.
- 36.
On the topic of mixed motives in such acts of financial subvention of intellectuals, compare Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 108:
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Wittgenstein’s [1914] offer to Ficker [of 100,000 crowns] was motivated not only by philanthropy, but also by a desire to establish some contact with the intellectual life of Austria. After all, [in 1914] he had severed communication with his Cambridge friends, Russell and Moore, despairing of their ever understanding his ideals and sensitivities. Perhaps among Austrians he might be better understood.
- 37.
See Frege to Wittgenstein of 30 September 1919, translated below.
- 38.
His frequently suicidal state in the later summer and early fall of 1919 are described by Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, pp. 170ff.
- 39.
Again, compare von Wright’s “The Origin of the Tractatus”, especially pp. 77ff., and Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 170ff. for a discussion of Wittgenstein’s initially fruitless efforts to have his essay published without subvention, which more than one person raised as a possibility (and he roundly rejected), and compare the discussion by McGuinness in Wittgenstein: A Life, Young Ludwig 1889–1921, pp. 267ff.
- 40.
Georg Henrik von Wright, “The Origin of the Tractatus”, p. 78.
- 41.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 181.
- 42.
Wittgenstein to Hermine Wittgenstein, 1 August 1919, Briefwechsel, makes clear that he received Frege’s letter on 30 July 1919. On 3 August 1919 Wittgenstein had written back to Frege, a letter that Frege did not reply to explicitly, on grounds that “it set so much in motion in me that if I had followed up on every stimulating point I would have had to write a book rather than a letter” (Frege to Wittgenstein 16 September 1919).
- 43.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 163.
- 44.
See Briefwechsel and Cambridge Letters, pp. 131–132.
- 45.
Compare Wittgenstein’s outraged comments about the publisher Braumüller’s suggestion that he pay for the publication of the manuscript in a letter to Ficker of c. 7 October 1919; these and the relevant surrounding correspondence with Russell, Engelmann and others about such “humiliating conditions” are translated and discussed in von Wright, “The Origin of the Tractatus”.
- 46.
See McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, p. 278 and Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 171.
- 47.
See Hermine’s contribution in Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein, pp. 3–4. Her remarks should be compared with McGuinness’s and Monk’s biographical discussions, respectively, and with some remarks on asceticism in McGuinness’s “Asceticism and Ornament”, in his Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers.
- 48.
Here it is useful to compare the correspondence between Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl and Ludwig regarding Waismann’s request, after Schlick’s assassination in 1936, that the Wittgenstein family endow a professorship in Vienna in Schlick’s name. Mining’s report to Ludwig (in a letter of July 11, 1936) is that she was made very uncomfortable about this request, and told Waismann that “we” (i.e., the Wittgenstein family) “would never do such a thing”, that “we are not influential, and, even if we were, we would never apply ourselves to such a thing, and even if we did, you would kill us, and even if you didn’t, you would never allow such a thing to be considered” (see Briefwechsel).
- 49.
He did not fully succeed, given subsequent events following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, for large-scale decisions about the handling of the family fortune required a unanimous vote of the siblings. Monk details Ludwig’s entanglement in the harrowing family battle over whether to hand over foreign currency to the Nazis in exchange for Aryan papers in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 400. Compare Ursula Prokops’s biography Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein: Bauherrin Intellektuelle Mäzenin (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2003) as well as related correspondence in Wittgenstein Familienbriefe, eds. B. McGuinness, M.C. Ascher, and O. Pfersmann (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1996) and in Briefwechsel.
- 50.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, pp. 354 and 356.
- 51.
Compare Rhees’s testimony, recounted in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 357.
- 52.
My translation; cf. entry of 16 May 1930 in Denkbewegungen, Tagebücher 1930–1932/1936–1937 (MS 183), ed. I. Somavilla (Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag, 1997), p. 28 and in English, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, J.C. Klagge and A. Nordmann, eds. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), p. 39.
- 53.
On his philosophy of mathematics, this point is explained well in Ray Monk, “Bourgeois, Bolshevist or Anarchist? The Reception of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics”, in Wittgenstein and His Interpreters, eds. G. Kahane, E. Kanterian, and O. Kuusela (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 269–294.
- 54.
In a letter to Oskar Becker of August 13, 1954, Scholz writes that the pages of a sketch he had worked up about Wittgenstein’s later writings “that went out in the same mail which I sent to you, have been returned. I will not be agonizing any more about it. These pseudo-sibylline pages have absolutely nothing in them for me”. (The letter is in the Scholz archive at the University of Münster library, along with correspondence with von Wright in which Scholz is open about his inability to make headway with Wittgenstein’s writings, or with any philosophy inspired by it.) Wittgenstein’s 1936 brush-off may or may not have led to Scholz’s later frustration.
- 55.
This is discussed in Thomas Ricketts, “Pictures, Logic, and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”, in H. Sluga and D. Stern eds., The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 59–99.
- 56.
Hans Sluga, “Frege on the Indefinability of Truth”, in E. Reck, ed., From Frege to Wittgenstein (op. cit.), pp. 75–95; quotations from pp. 89, 77.
- 57.
Sluga, “Frege on the Indefinability of Truth”, p. 92.
- 58.
On the change between Wittgenstein’s earliest writings up through the Prototractatus to the more “holistic” use of Frege’s context principle in the Tractatus, see Michael Kremer, “Contextualism and Holism in the Early Wittgenstein”, Philosophical Topics 25, 2 (1992): 87–120.
- 59.
See Thomas Ricketts, “Logic and Truth in Frege”, The Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 70 (1996): 121–140.
- 60.
On the importance of faithful representation of reality to ideas in the Tractatus, see Hintikka, “What Does the Wittgensteinian Inexpressible Express?”, The Harvard Review of Philosophy. I reply to some of Hintikka’s views in my “Wittgenstein and the Inexpressible” in A. Crary, ed., Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 177–234.
- 61.
See my précis of the Scholz list comments in my Preface to the translations of the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence in this volume.
- 62.
See Russell’s letter to Frege of 12 December 1904 in Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, eds. B. McGuinness, G. Gabriel et al., trans. H. Kaal (Blackwell/University of Chicago Press, 1980), especially p. 169. Goldfarb (“Wittgenstein’s Understanding of Frege”, p. 188) says he knows of no evidence that Wittgenstein discussed Frege’s work with Russell (nor do I). But it is difficult to imagine that the subject of Frege on sense and reference never came up.
- 63.
Readers may see Sluga, “Frege on the Indefinability of Truth” for an analysis of Frege’s own evolution with regard to the notion of truth. With respect to Wittgenstein’s development, Goldfarb argues persuasively that at least in the pre-Tractatus writings “the priority for Frege of the notion of recognition-of-truth to that of truth did not register on Wittgenstein, or at least there is no evidence that it did … Frege elaborates the point only in “Thoughts” … and in unpublished writings” (“Wittgenstein’s Understanding of Frege”, p. 192). What I am arguing here is that given Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of logic, which were after all in place well before the manuscript of the Tractatus was written, it would not have been possible for him to agree with Frege’s idea of recognition-of-truth as a basic logical notion. I fully agree with Goldfarb that Frege’s conception cut off at the pass, as perhaps Wittgenstein’s did not, the very idea of facts or configurations that render our propositions true, and the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence seems to confirm this.
- 64.
Geach, Preface to Frege, Logical Investigations, ed. P.T. Geach, trans. P.T. Geach and R.H. Stoothoff (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. vii.
- 65.
This point is made by Erich Reck, in his “Wittgenstein’s ‘Great Debt’ to Frege”, p. 27.
- 66.
Geach, Preface to Frege, Logical Investigations.
- 67.
Both examples are from Geach, Preface to Frege, Logical Investigations.
- 68.
See Russell to Frege of 12 December 1904, in Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, p. 169.
- 69.
This is reported by Norman Malcolm, in his Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (2nd edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 70.
- 70.
Geach, Preface to Frege, Logical Investigations.
- 71.
I have tried to engage the structure and text of Tractatus with systematic aspects of the Idealist tradition in my essays “Tautology: How Not to Use a Word” (with B. Dreben), Synthese 87/1 (April 1991): 23–50 and “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in the Tractatus” in L. Rouner, ed., Loneliness (Notre Dame: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, 1998), pp. 79–108. See also David Pears, The False Prison, vol. I (New York: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987) and Peter Sullivan, “The truth in solipsism, and Wittgenstein’s rejection of the a priori”, European Journal of Philosophy 4 (1996): 195–219.
- 72.
See TS 213, pp. 405–435 of The Big Typescript, eds. and trans. C.G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
- 73.
Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, pp. 29–30.
- 74.
McGuinness, “Asceticism and Ornament”, pp. 21–22.
- 75.
McGuinness, “Asceticism and Ornament”, p. 22.
- 76.
McGuinness, “Asceticism and Ornament”, pp. 23ff.
- 77.
McGuinness, “Asceticism and Ornament”, p. 24.
- 78.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 346.
- 79.
Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, p. 65.
- 80.
Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, p. 30.
- 81.
Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, p. 65.
- 82.
See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, pp. 296–297. For remarks invoking a similar vision of what is most valuable in Wittgenstein’s work, compare Putnam’s remarks on the Tractatus in “Floyd, Wittgenstein and Loneliness”, in L. Rouner, ed., Loneliness, pp. 109–114.
- 83.
I do not mean here that there was no development in Wittgenstein’s views, as I make clear in my “Wittgenstein and the Inexpressible”.
- 84.
Thanks to Wolfgang Kienzler for pointing me toward the Lessing and Heidegger quotations in connection with the Frege letter to Wittgenstein of 16 September 1919 and to Kenneth Haynes, who had pointed me toward the Heidegger quote some years ago, in mind of Wittgenstein (a translation of this quote by Haynes (with J. Young) may be found in Off the Beaten Track, trans. and eds. J. Young and K. Haynes (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 255). Heidegger is said to have copied the Lessing quote into the copy of Sein und Zeit that he gave to Edmund Husserl in 1927 (see Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and The Confrontation with Heidegger, trans. and eds. T. Sheehan and R.E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), pp. 21ff). (Daniel Dahlstrom has told me that that Heidegger might have learned of the Lessing source from Paul Lorentz, ed., Lessings Philosophie: Denkmäler aus der Zeit des Kampfes zwischen Aufklärung und Humanität in der deutschen Geistesbildung (Leipzig: Meiner Verlag, 1909), p. 98.)
- 85.
I am grateful for conversations with Enzo De Pellegrin, Norma Goethe, Allan Janik, Wolfgang Kienzler and Brian McGuinness throughout the writing of this essay, as well as the students in my seminars on Wittgenstein and Frege at Boston University from 2000 to the present who provided me with helpful feedback on the ideas discussed here. A Fulbright research award to Austria gave me time and place to gather primary materials. Burton Dreben, W.V. Quine, G.H. von Wright and participants at the University of California Riverside conference on early analytic philosophy in 1998 (a conference organized through the good offices of Erich Reck) provided helpful encouragement at an early stage in the formulation of my thoughts.
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Floyd, J. (2011). The Frege-Wittgenstein Correspondence: Interpretive Themes. In: De Pellegrin, E. (eds) Interactive Wittgenstein. Synthese Library, vol 349. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9909-0_3
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