Ludwig Wittgensteins Whewell´s Court Lectures

This proposal is a succession of project P18200-G06. The project has been devoted to editing hitherto unpublished lecture notes of lectures held by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The notes were taken down by Yorick Smythies, a student and very close friend of Wittgenstein. The notes cover the period between 1938 and 1947. Most of them were taken between the second part of the academic year 1937/1938 and 1939/1940. 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, A Lecture on Freedom of the Will, and Wittgenstein`s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. All these publications contain Smythies` notes. Extensive research has proven the high quality of the notes. The publication of the material will no doubt open new discussions on Wittgenstein`s treatment of central philosophical questions. The fact that Wittgenstein discusses various subjects in his lectures in a more systematic and focused way than in his own written work particularly manifests the value of Smythies` notes. The unpublished corpus offers a different kind of approach towards the questions Wittgenstein discusses, since the series of lectures contain a kind of continuity which is not found in his published writings in a similar way. Furthermore, Wittgenstein uses numerous examples during his lectures that we also find in many of his published works, mostly identical, or at least similar, and often located in different contexts. In particular, the distribution of examples shows the connections and interrelations between various subjects Wittgenstein discusses that are in no way obvious at first sight. A comparison of the contexts will help the reader to see the different questions Wittgenstein addresses to the same kind of problem. Therefore, a study of the notes is an ideal complement to Wittgenstein`s published work. The material exist in various stages: First, the original notes Smythies took during the lectures. They are written in a very difficult and hardly legible stenography that Smythies applied for the purpose of being as close as possible to what Wittgenstein said during the lectures. From those notes, Smythies compiled various handwritten fair copies. Finally, a secretary prepared a collection of typescripts out of 21 tapes Smythies dictated mostly on the basis of his rewritten notes. Copyrights of the lecture notes and the Smythies Nachlass belong to the author of this proposal. The central aim of the research project is to create a printed version of the complete corpus of notes Smythies took during the lectures and a series of audible data media, based on Smythies` tape recordings. The collection will be accompanied by a facsimile of the handwritten manuscripts on Digital Video Disc. In cooperation with the Brenner Archive Innsbruck the whole corpus will additionally be converted into XML/TEI format and shall be interlinked with the Bergen Electronic Edition, new editions of Wittgenstein material (e.g. Culture and Value, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief), and the Gesamtbriefwechsel. A companion shall reflect and discuss essential topics and interconnections between the notes and Wittgenstein`s work as well as their historical and systematic background.

The aim of the FWF project Wittgensteins Whewells Court Lectures was to provide a reliable primary text on the basis of hitherto unpublished notes from lectures Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951) gave mainly between 1938 and 1941 in Cambridge. The lecture notes were made by Yorick Smythies (19171980), a pupil and close friend of Wittgensteins. Smythies already served as a major source for earlier publications of lectures. His lecture notes survived on different media and in different stages of elaboration: as notes taken down immediately during the lectures, as fair copies which Smythies composed on the basis of his lecture notes and, in some cases, the notes of others, as tapes on which Smythies reads out the lectures, and as typed versions which are based on these recordings. Whenever possible the printed text follows the immediate lecture notes, which Smythies wrote in a private short-hand; sometimes barely legible. The English text was carefully edited, annotated with references to Wittgensteins published and unpublished writings and provided with introductions. The introductions give a physical description of the utilised material, information about when the lectures were given and about their relationship to Wittgensteins Nachlass (i.e., literary estate). One of the greatest challenges was the dating of the notes, since in most cases no explicit information is given at all. In spite of that, the editors succeeded in dating every set of notes with high probability to the year and the term. Clues could be derived from Wittgensteins correspondence, which allowed to reconstruct Smythies presence in Cambridge; from the students names mentioned in the lectures; from rough lecture summaries they published here and there; and from Wittgensteins Nachlass. The Whewells Court Lectures provide new insight into the development of Wittgensteins thought, in particular concerning the themes of On Certainty and concept-formation. They also contain discussions of authors about which there is little to be found in Wittgensteins other works. Apart from Russell, Moore and James, Wittgenstein talks about Gödels theorems, about W. E. Johnson and the question whether there is an infinite number of shades of colour, and about Humes conception of belief. The lectures also underline the importance of imagery and pictures in Wittgensteins thought. There are new passages with the famous metaphor of the fly in the fly-bottle and about 70 blackboard drawings copied by Smythies. The lectures include some of the finest examples of Wittgenstein lectures that came to us with regard to both contents and reliability. The volume will appear in 2016 bearing the title The Whewells Court Lectures, Cambridge 19381941, by Ludwig Wittgenstein; the publisher is Wiley-Blackwell.