Zettel [Book Review]

In the past few years there has been an attempt to publish a variety of Wittgenstein's unpublished notes, scraps, and clippings. While the publication of his early Notebooks was an important contribution for understanding Wittgenstein's Tractarian period, the value of some of the other material published is dubious. The Zettel consists of a collection of fragments that Wittgenstein himself put in a box-file. Many of the clippings are taken from other manuscripts and most of these are taken from typescripts dictated from 1945-1948. The present collection lacks the sustained power of either the Tractatus or the Philosophical Investigations. There is little here that appears to be strikingly new, although some points discussed in the Philosophical Investigations are explored in novel ways. The procedure of printing the German text with facing English translation is followed here. And the translation shows the same high standards evidenced in the other translations of Wittgenstein by Miss Anscombe.--R. J. B.