The Whewell’s Court Lectures: A Sketch of a Project

Abstract

The following text is not really a philosophical contribution but rather a short outline of a research project that has been concerned with the edition of hitherto unpublished notes of lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The notes were taken down by Yorick Smythies, a student and very close friend of Wittgenstein, and cover the period between 1938 and 1947. Most of them were written between the second part of the academic year 1937–38 and 1939–40. Some notes refer to sessions held in 1936–37. No other notes from that period are known to exist except the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (LC), A Lecture on Freedom of the Will (PO, 427–44), and Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (LFM). All these publications contain Smythies’ notes.