David Stern | The first complete translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its German source

David Stern: “From the Iowa Tractatus Map to the first complete translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its German sources”, 7 October 2022.

This presentation was a part of the 7th Symposium of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, “70 Years of Editing Wittgenstein. History, Challenges and Possibilities”, co-organised by the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project, hosted by the University of Milan, 7–8 October 2022.

Abstract:

The Iowa Tractatus Map, on the web at http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/ since 2016, makes available the text of the Tractatus and ProtoTractatus in the form of a pair of tree-structured networks. Clicking on the nodes and lines in each map brings up the associated text; the reader can choose to view the original German, the translations by Pears and McGuinness (of both texts) or the Ogden-Ramsey translation (of the Tractatus). The pair of maps enables the reader to explore the tree-structured arrangement that the author used to arrange its numbered remarks, and to visualize the step-by-step assembly of the ProtoTractatus.

However, the Map does not chart the relationship between these stages of the book’s composition and the three surviving wartime notebooks which contain earlier drafts of much of this material. In part, this is because the Map is based on the book’s numbering system, which is not used in the notebooks, and so there is no straightforward way of extending the Map to include this material, and in part because there is no suitable translation: the only English translation of the parallel passages, by GEM Anscombe, is so different from the others that it is not suitable for such a task. For the last few years, I have collaborated with Joachim Schulte and Katia Saporiti on the first complete translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its German sources (MSS 101-104). One aim has been to produce a translation that can facilitate a digital edition that will enable readers to explore the relationship between Wittgenstein’s wartime philosophical notes, his personal coded diaries, and the path that led to the final text of the Tractatus. In this talk, I will discuss our work on this project.

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