An open library of thought
Show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present the Tractatus, the only philosophical book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, and two posthumous works edited by his literary executors. The Blue and Brown Books, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Zettel, Culture and Value, lecture notes, letters and the Bergen edition of the Nachlass are not yet indexed; this is a selection, not a complete bibliography.
011921
Drafted in notebooks kept during his service in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1914 and completed in 1918, it appeared in German in 1921 and in a bilingual edition in 1922 with an introduction by Bertrand Russell that Wittgenstein felt misread it. It was the only philosophical book he published. Readers still dispute whether its nonsense conveys ineffable insights or is meant to dissolve itself completely.
021953
Wittgenstein worked on the book from 1936 and dated its preface January 1945, but withdrew it from publication and allowed it to appear only after his death. It was published in 1953, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, with Anscombe’s English facing the German. The editors printed a later typescript as Part II; the 2009 revision by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte calls it Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment.
031969
Written between 1949 and 1951, during the last eighteen months of his life, the notes were never revised; the final entry dates from two days before his death. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright selected and published them in 1969 with an English translation by Denis Paul and Anscombe. They have become central to recent debates on skepticism and so-called hinge epistemology.