/lit/ - Literature

>Wittgenstein at his death left the copyright of his writings to selected students with instructions to publish whatever they saw fit. But the publication of these works, starting with the Philosophical Investigations, has sometimes involved highly significant editorial decisions and interventions that are not properly explained. As a result, the editing contributed to a misleading image of Wittgenstein as the author of completed works, which in turn may have problematically affected the interpretation of his philosophy. If the materials from which the works were compiled were not intended to express any definitive and/or consistent views on a particular subject but rather to the task of examining its different aspects, then it is problematic to present them as anything else. A case in point: it has been argued (see Josef Rothhaupt's contribution) that Wittgenstein's typescript TS 213 (the so-called Big Typescript) from which his Philosophical Grammar was edited was really only meant as an archive of remarks, not a book to be published.

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