Dr Kim Solin, 'The 1974 revision of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics'.

This session has been postponed and will be rescheduled in due course. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings on mathematics were published posthumously in 1956 as the volume Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. It comprises a selection from his Nachlass done by the three editors Georg Henrik von Wright, Rush Rhees and Elizabeth Anscombe. The Remarks were not well received by the philosophical community and therefore the editors later decided to revise them. Work on the revised edition began in 1971 and was finished 1974. In this talk, I shall discuss the history of the Remarks and some of editors’ concerns during the revision. Their concerns are philosophically relevant for understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics.

My work is based on archival research at The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki and the talk is based on a chapter in the recent anthology The Creation Wittgenstein: Understanding the Roles of Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright (ed. Thomas Wallgren, Bloomsbury 2023).