While Wittgenstein wrote unconventionally and denied that he was advancing philosophical theses, most of his interpreters have attributed conventional philosophical theses to him. But the best recent interpretations have taken the form of his writing and his distinctive way of doing philosophy seriously. The 1980s have also seen the emergence of a body of work on Wittgenstein that makes extensive use of the unpublished Wittgenstein papers. This work on Wittgenstein's method and his way of writing are the main themes of (...) this literature review.Section 1 surveys Wittgenstein's conception of philosophical method and its reception. Section 2 is a review of recent work on rule-following and the methodological issues it raises. Section 3 concerns research on the WittgensteinNachlass and its implications for the interpretation of his philosophy. (shrink)

Building on the unpublished correspondence between Ludwig Wittgenstein's literary executors Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright, this paper sketches the historical development of different editorial approaches to Wittgenstein's Nachlass. Using the metaphor of a ladder, it is possible to distinguish seven significant “rungs” or “steps” in the history of editing Wittgenstein's writings. The paper focuses particularly on the first four rungs, elucidating how Rhees, Anscombe and von Wright developed different editorial approaches that resulted in significant differences in (...) their editions. The paper sheds light on how these editorial differences are grounded in the editors' divergent understandings of their task. It is suggested that future research may investigate the development of editorial approaches to Wittgenstein's Nachlass as a human story of philosophical inheritance. (shrink)

This paper uses archival material to contextualize Georg Henrik von Wright’s making of Vermischte Bemerkungen (Culture and Value), an edition that assembles Wittgenstein’s remarks on cultural topics. Von Wright was particularly interested in these remarks but initially regarded them as too detached from philosophy to be published. In 1967-68, however, he began seeing socio-political questions as belonging to philosophy. He then resumed editing Wittgenstein’s ‘general remarks’ and published them in 1977. Von Wright did not read Culture and Value as a (...) philosophical work, but as a means for helping readers understand Wittgenstein in relation to his times. It is argued that the intention to provide documents enabling readers to recognize the historical Wittgenstein motivated much of von Wright’s work as one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors. Moreover, through making available his own archives, he inspired the same documentary approach to fathom the history of editing Wittgenstein in its historical context. (shrink)