About Wittgenstein’s (Late) Writings

This website aims to provide a reader-friendly electronic edition of the (late) writings from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Nachlass.

It consists of a set of normalised transcriptions whose emphasis is on readability rather than on philological richness: we opted for editorial criteria whereby textual variants are not reproduced and only those features of the originals which have the strongest semantic significance are preserved.

The transcriptions are mobile responsive, they are accessible to readers who use assistive tools, and they can be exported as e-books and PDFs.

The scope of this website is currently limited to the manuscripts and typescripts composed by Wittgenstein between 1937 and 1951. In the future, we would like to expand the website to also include materials from the period between 1914 and 1936.

Historical background

The Nachlass (estate) is the body of writings which Wittgenstein left behind upon his death on 29 April 1951. In his testament, he had appointed three among his most trusted students and friends as his literary executors and he had tasked them with publishing what they thought fit from his papers.

While the trustees—Rush Rhees, G.E.M. Anscombe, G.H. von Wright—immediately started working on the edition of the Philosophical Investigations, which Wittgenstein had himself come close to finalising for publication and which came out in 1953, it took years for them to even determine the full magnitude of the Nachlass. It eventually turned out to consist of approximately 20.000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts in German and English.

In the following four decades, Wittgenstein’s literary heirs published the books which we are used to thinking of as Wittgenstein’s posthumous “works”. Alongside the only book-length philosophical work he published during his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), these works are what gives most of us our picture of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Among them, just to name a few, are the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956), the Blue and Brown Books (1958), the Notebooks 1914–1916 (1960), the Philosophical Remarks (1964), Philosophical Grammar (1969), On Certainty (1969), Culture and Value (1977), the Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (1982–1992).

In 1968 a large portion of the “raw” Nachlass became available for the first time through a photographic copy of the manuscripts and typescripts which was made under the supervision of von Wright and Norman Malcom at Cornell University. Around the same time, in his article titled The Wittgenstein Papers (1969), von Wright catalogued the available Nachlass materials according to the numbering system which is still used today. Von Wright himself expanded his catalogue over the years, and his numbering systems has also been used to catalogue Nachlass items that were discovered after his death in 2003.

The titled works are the result of the editor’s processing of materials from the Nachlass. In some cases the editorial intervention was limited to choosing among textual variants and polishing such relatively minor aspects as orthography and punctuation; this was the case when strong enough evidence existed that it would make sense to publish contiguous portions of the Nachlass under a given title (Notebooks 1914–1916, Philosophical Remarks, Blue and Brown Books). In other cases, passages from separate manuscripts and typescripts were selected and collated (based on philosophical affinity or chronological proximity) to form more heavily edited books; examples of this modus operandi are the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Philosophical Grammar, Culture and Value.

The often-complicated relationship between the posthumously published books and their source materials has always meant that direct access to the Nachlass in its unedited form is very important for Wittgenstein scholars: being able to compare the titled works with Wittgenstein’s own text, ideally in the form of a facsimile rather than a transcription, is a requisite for independently assessing the editor’s choices.

The sheer size of the Nachlass, on the other hand, and the difficulty of navigating it, soon made it desirable for at least an index, and at best a concordance, to become available. It was also clear from very early on that the emerging computer technologies could prove valuable to these ends.

The first attempt at transcribing the Nachlass digitally was made in Tübingen with a preliminary phase between 1973 and 1974 and operational phase between 1978 and 1982. The project, however, was unsuccessful, and its failure even put strain on the relationship between the three literary heirs, ultimately causing a 10-year moratorium (1982–1992) on new editions of Wittgenstein’s writings.

The first successful digitisation of the Nachlass was carried out in Norway and culminated with the publication of the Bergen Electronic Edition (BEE), consisting of six CD-ROMs that were published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

The Norwegian Wittgenstein Project had been initiated by Viggo Rossvær in 1980, on the impulse of von Wright, to study the Nachlass after four Norwegian universities had shared the financial burden of purchasing one copy of the Cornell Edition. During the early 1980s, the NWP produced some transcriptions. Although these were only intended as internal research tools and were not meant to be published, Anscombe—who was sceptical in the wake of the Tübingen debacle—prohibited the NWP from carrying on further transcription work. Starting in 1985, Claus Huitfeld, the new director of the NWP, now based in Bergen, made every diplomatic effort to obtain the literary heirs’ permission to resume working on the transcriptions, to no avail. The NWP was eventually disbanded in 1989.

Rush Rhees died in 1989 and his place as a trustee was taken by Peter Winch; Anthony Kenny also became involved in the decisions concerning the Nachlass as von Wright’s designated successor. In 1990, thanks to Kenny’s mediation, the trustees agreed to the creation of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB), to be led by Huitfeld, and granted this newly founded institution permission to produce a transcription of the entire Nachlass. This time, the transcription was indeed meant for publication. The BEE was the result of the work carried out by the WAB in the following decade.

Nowadays, the WAB’s XML transcriptions and the complete electronic edition of the Nachlass that is based on them—being dynamic, searchable, very rich in meta-textual information, and accompanied by high-quality facsimiles of the original manuscripts and typescripts—are the gold standard of Wittgenstein digital scholarship and a necessary reference point for all Wittgenstein-related editorial work.

In the 2010s, what used to be a CD-based tool became a web-based constellation of websites, which includes:

On 1 January 2022, Wittgenstein’s writings entered the public domain in those countries where the copyright term is 70 years after the author’s death. This caused Wittgenstein’s writings to become more widely available online, including through the efforts of the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project (LWP), a community-run website whose “vision” and “mission” are inspired by those of the Wikimedia movement and which aims to make Wittgenstein’s published writings (the “works” we mentioned above) available as user-friendly, multilingual reading editions.

This website aims to fill the space between the WAB’s websites and the LWP’s. Its focus is mainly on the Nachlass, as is the case with the WAB, but its primary goal is to offer an intuitive reading experience that helps the user focus on the philosophical content of the texts rather than to provide detailed information on the text’s spatial layout, historical stratification, etc.—its approach is, in this way, similar to the LWP’s.

Editorial criteria

The webpages of which the site consists are shaped by a set of editorial criteria which deliberately prioritise simplicity and readability by choosing not to include information about some of the features of Wittgenstein’s originals.

The general goal is to make the transcriptions easy to approach for those who do not have a strong background knowledge of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass while still allowing readers to easily compare them with the corresponding facsimiles. The site aims to offer the friendliest possible user experience, with the extreme use case in mind of someone who would want to read the Nachlass on their phone while sitting on the underground.

To each remark from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass corresponds a transcription in the plain-text Markdown markup language. Markdown is known for being very simple, easy to read, and semantically oriented (that is, it is only fit to encode information which carries a strong meaning, such as paragraph breaks, emphasis, lists, images). For more information on the Markdown dialect used by the transcriptions, and to consult the transcription source files themselves, please see the wittgensteinnachlass GitHub repository.

The Markdown source files are presented on the website as HTML pages.

The remarks can be browsed in two complementary ways:

The transcription is a linear, not a diplomatic one. The textual phenomena that have been retained are the following:

All other textual phenomena have not been encoded in the source files and are therefore not reproduced in the HTML pages. In particular:

Mathematical formulae have been encoded using MathML syntax.

The images have been sourced from the Wittgenstein Nachlass Graphics website and are the result of a project, carried out by the WAB between 2022 and 2024, to improve its rendering of Wittgenstein’s drawings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein died in 1951. Therefore, the Nachlass is in the public domain in all countries and territories where copyright expires 70 years or fewer after the author’s death. This includes most countries in Europe, the entirety of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, most countries in Central and South America, and Canada.

Worldwide map of copyright term length, color-coded

For a literary work to be lawfully published on the Internet (which is tantamount to a worldwide simultaneous publication) it is usually considered a necessary and sufficient condition that it be in the public domain in its country of origin and in the country where the website is based. Regarding users who are not located in the country of origin of the work nor in the country where the website is based, it is their responsibility to comply with the copyright rules of their own country when visiting the website; and it is in the power of governments to block access to websites that contain materials which are copyrighted in their country.

This website is based in Germany, where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years.

Determining the country of origin of the Nachlass (or rather, of the items the Nachlass consists of) is not entirely straightforward.

The Berne Convention (article 5(4a)) states that, in the case of works first published in one of the signatory countries of the convention itself (the “countries of the Union”), the country of origin is the country where the work is first published. (If the work is published simultaneously, i.e. within 30 days, in two or more countries of the Union, its country of origin is the country which grants the shortest term of protection”—articles 3(4) and 5(4a).)

Much of the Nachlass was first published in the United States in the Cornell Edition. Although the Cornell Edition is an unusual object, there is no doubt that it meets the criteria for considering a publication such as defined by both the Berne Convention (article 3(3)) and US law (17 USC 101; see also US Copyright Office Circular 40). Those parts of the Nachlass which were first published in the Cornell Edition are in the public domain in the US, because the Cornell Edition did not carry a copyright notice (it did not include an imprint at all) and therefore it failed to comply with the formalities that, at the time, were required by US law for a work to be copyrighted in the first place.

The parts of the Nachlass that were not published as part of the Cornell Edition are:

  1. Those that had already been published as of 1968;
  2. Those that were covered (hidden, masked) in the Cornell Edition, i.e. the passages of a private nature that Wittgenstein wrote in his secret code (Geheimschrift);
  3. Those that had not been discovered as of 1968 or otherwise did not make their way into the Cornell Edition.

As far as point (1) is concerned, the Nachlass manuscripts, or fragments thereof, that had been edited and published before 1968 are those that became known as the Philosophical Investigations (1953), Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956), the Blue and Brown Books (1958), the Notebooks 1914–1916 (1960), the Philosophical Remarks (1964), Zettel (1967). All of these have either the United Kingdom or Germany as their country of origin and are thus now out of copyright in their country of origin.

As far as point (2) is concerned, the first editions of Wittgenstein’s so-called Private Notebooks (the subset of the coded contents of the Nachlass dating from the World War I period) were effectively pirate editions and therefore do not count as a publication per the Berne Convention (article 3(3)). Examples are the German and Catalan and the German and Castilian ones edited by W. Baum in 1985 and the Italian one edited by F. Funtò in 1987. Those of the coded remarks that are contained in Nachlass items preserved at the Wren Library in Cambridge were first published as uncovered, readable content in a lawful way (i.e., with the consent of the literary heirs) as part of the Trinity College Library Microfilm of Wittgenstein's Nachlass no later than 1993, when a copy of this microfilm was purchased by the University of Bergen. Their country of origin is then the United Kingdom. While the UK’s default copyright term is 70 years after the author’s death (the same as most other European countries), the UK has specific provisions for posthumous works, known as the “2039 rule”: literary works created before 1 August 1989 by authors who died before 1 January 1969 and which were first published after 1 August 1989 are copyrighted in the UK until 31 December 2039. It is unclear, however, whether the Trinity College Library Microfilm was published before or after this critical UK cutoff. If it was published before that date, the relevant coded remarks are in the public domain in their country of origin; if it was published after that date, they will enter the public domain on 1 January 2040, and in the meantime they are licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0) by will of the copyright holders.

The entire corpus of the coded remarks was later published as part of the Bergen Electronic Edition of the Nachlass in 1998–2000. The country of origin of the BEE is, again, the United Kingdom. The coded remarks that were unpublished as of the BEE, if any, will enter the public domain on 1 January 2040, and in the meantime they are licenced under CC BY-NC 4.0.

As far as point (3) is concerned, the Cornell microfilm did not include some items that are now considered an integral part of the Nachlass, and in particular:

In the European Union, pursuant to Directive EC/116/2006, article 4, works that are first published after the expiry of the copyright term (i.e., usually, 70 years PMA) enjoy a 25-year period during which the publisher “shall benefit from a protection equivalent to the economic rights of the author”. This will only affect newly discovered Nachlass items published after 1 January 2022.

The facsimiles that are available on this website are from Wittgenstein Source, a website run by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen and curated by Alois Pichler and Joseph Wang-Kathrein. Please see the “About BNE” section of the Wittgenstein Source website for more information about the history of the facsimiles. Creating faithful photographic reproductions (such as photocopies or digital scans) of two-dimensional media does not suffice as the basis for a copyright claim; in other words, the copyright status of the facsimiles is the same as that of the source material.

The drawings from the Wittgenstein Nachlass Graphics website are licenced by the copyright owners under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) (for more information, see Wittgenstein Nachlass Graphics – About).

People

The people who contributed to creating this website are:

Further reading

Lavazza, Michele: The Copyright Status of Wittgenstein’s Works, in: Wittgenstein-Studien 14 (2023), 153–183.