Abstract
One of the most crucial developments in Wittgenstein’s philosophy was his rejection of phenomenological languages in October 1929. His notebooks from that period show how he came to take that momentous step. In this paper, I will present a translation of the crucial entries together with a commentary. It will turn out that Wittgenstein’s brief notebook remarks are in reality connected with all sorts of different ideas in his overall philosophical thought and serve to illustrate them, even ideas that are not directly connected with his change of his main position vis-à-vis the contrast of physicalistic and phenomenological languages.
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Notes
- 1.
See Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), pp. 302–303.
- 2.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 51. Page references to the Philosophical Remarks will be to this edition.
- 3.
See Philosophical Remarks, pp. 97–101.
- 4.
See my “Ernst Mach at the Crossroads of Twentieth-Century Philosophy” in Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, edited by Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 81–101. See also Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1988), pp. 38–40.
- 5.
See Philosophical Remarks, pp. 58, 84.
- 6.
Microfilm copies of many of Wittgenstein’s known notebooks from 1929 until 1932 have been publicly accessible and available for purchase since 1967 through the Cornell University library system. Parts of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass were later published in the Wiener Ausgabe edited by Michael Nedo. A joint project of Oxford University Press and The Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen recently resulted in the publication of a series of CD-ROMs (Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)), which provide scholars with both a highly readable rendering of the German text of a large portion of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass as well as with image files of the individually scanned manuscript and typescript pages. References to writings from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass will be to this most recent edition.
- 7.
See Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). p. 151.
- 8.
See the 1929 paper “Some Remarks on Logical Form”, first published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. vol. 9 (1929), pp. 162–171. Reprinted in Philosophical Occasions. 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 29–35.
- 9.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. The German text, with a revised English translation, third edition, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2001), §253. Anscombe mistranslates “genau gleich” as “exactly the same”, thus missing the crucial contrast between “derselbe” and “genau gleicher”. References to the Philosophical Investigations will be to this edition.
- 10.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), pp. 87–88, dated January 5, 1930.
- 11.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, p. 67.
- 12.
See also Philosophical Remarks, p. 81.
- 13.
See also Philosophical Remarks, p. 88.
- 14.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, p. 99.
- 15.
See my “Ludwig’s Apple Tree: On the Philosophical Relations between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half-Truths. (Jaakko Hintikka Selected Papers vol. 1), edited by Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1996), pp. 125–144.
- 16.
As can be seen, e.g., in Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, pp. 213–215.
- 17.
I have examined this topic (jointly with Merrill B. Hintikka) in our 1985 paper “Ludwig Looks at the Necker Cube: The Problem of ‘Seeing As’ as a Clue to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy”, reprinted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half-Truths, pp. 179–190.
- 18.
See also Philosophical Remarks, p. 265.
- 19.
This conclusion can be compared with a similar announcements on p. 88 of Philosophical Remarks and on p. 45 of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (dated December 22, 1929).
- 20.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, p. 254.
- 21.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, p. 249.
- 22.
For the last paragraph, see also Philosophical Remarks, p. 221.
- 23.
Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1930–32. From the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 82.
- 24.
loc. cit.
- 25.
Philosophical Remarks, p. 51.
- 26.
Philosophical Remarks, p. 51.
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Hintikka, J. (2011). The Crash of the Philosophy of the Tractatus: The Testimony of Wittgenstein’s Notebooks in October 1929. In: De Pellegrin, E. (eds) Interactive Wittgenstein. Synthese Library, vol 349. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9909-0_5
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