On his death in 1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein left behind a philosophical
Nachlass of some 20,000 pages. Apart from the Tractatus, these papers were
at that point unpublished and largely unknown. The extent of the material
came as a surprise even to Wittgenstein's friends. The Trustees whom he had
appointed to manage his estate - G.E.M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, and G.H. von
Wright - were repeatedly obliged to reassess the scale of their task as more
and more material came to light. Their amazement was even greater on
learning that Wittgenstein had had further papers destroyed.
Wittgenstein's hope was that his Trustees might at last achieve what he
himself had never managed, namely to settle on a form for the publication of
his works. In his will of 29 January 1951 he wrote, 'I intend and desire
that Mr Rhees, Miss Anscombe, and Professor von Wright shall publish as many
of my unpublished writings as they think fit (...)'
Publication history
In 1953 G.E.M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees published
Philosophical
Investigations/Philosophische Untersuchungen. Since then many more texts
have been released in print. The story of the
Nachlass and the initial
phase of its publication is told
in von Wright's book
Wittgenstein (von Wright 1982). Of particular interest
is the chapter
The Wittgenstein Papers (first published 1969), which contains
what has meanwhile become the standard classification of the
Nachlass.
The text of the book publications has been available in electronic form for
several years but differs from the current edition in that 1. it was not
prepared especially for this medium, and 2. it includes only the book titles
edited and published posthumously, and not the entire
Nachlass.
The Bergen Electronic Edition
The Bergen Electronic Edition is the result of a long-term scholarly work
that serves the most exacting academic research purposes as well as general
interest for Wittgenstein's writings. As such it offers far more than a mere
visual representation of the original material. The core of the publication
consists of the facsimile pictures and two Infobases containing
the texts of the originals in Diplomatic and Normalized formats.
The Bergen Electronic Edition has been carried out in co-operation between
the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, the HIT Centre at
the University of Bergen (formerly the Norwegian Computing Centre for the
Humanities) and Oxford University Press. The Wittgenstein Archives has
designed the editorial principles, developed software tools, and prepared
the texts. The HIT Centre has developed the delivery system and
prepared the electronic facsimile. Oxford University Press has provided
digitized photographs of the entire
Nachlass and managed the publication
process.
A full history of the publication of
The Bergen Electronic Edition is
given in the
Introduction on the CD-ROM.
