05/10/2026
On the kind invitation of the British Wittgenstein Society, LWP volunteers Michele Lavazza and Frederic Kettelhoit will be delivering the 36th BWS online lecture on 3 November 2026 at 18:00 GMT. All are welcome to attend!
Please register using the Zoom link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/iO2D4QaFTvua3F8znDbWRw
Abstract:
Digital Wittgenstein: Expanding Access to the Late Writings
This talk will present the new “Wittgenstein’s (Late) Writings” website in the context of other digital resources aiming to expand the availability of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and edited writings.
The W(L)W website provides normalised, reader-friendly transcriptions of the Nachlass items dating from 1937 onwards (that is, starting from the time Wittgenstein transitioned from working on the Brown Book to working on what would become the Philosophical Investigations).
The new website’s goal—making Wittgenstein’s writings more accessible and readable while putting the Nachlass itself, rather than the “works”, in the spotlight—will be clarified by arguing that it is complementary to both the philologically accurate and meta-textually rich transcriptions published by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen and the multilingual reading editions published by the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project.
The website’s content, interface, and features will be briefly showcased before addressing the editorial choices that were made while designing and building it and the challenges that were met along the way. Because these challenges are partly due to the sheer size of the Nachlass, the strategies and tools that were used to automate some of the editorial work will be addressed explicitly; and a comparison will be drawn to the procedures adopted by the LWP to edit and translate texts, which rely on the work done manually by the LWP’s community of volunteers.
To conclude, an update will be shared about the translations and original-language editions that the LWP has recently published or is currently working on.
