Retranslating the Tractatus: The first complete translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and its sources

FAIN: FEL-268042-20

David Gerald Stern
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

Research and translation leading to publication of a complete English-language edition of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) Tractatus (1921).

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1922, is a foundational work of early analytic philosophy and a modernist literary masterpiece. Two short books will provide the first consistent, accurate, and complete translation of Tractatus and its sources. It will be the first translation of the book’s 526 numbered remarks to use the tree-structured order used to write it, as well as the numerical order in which it was published. This new arrangement will give experts a fresh way of looking at how the book was written. Beginning readers will find it considerably less difficult to read. The new edition includes the first translation of three successive drafts of Tractatus from 1915, 1916, and 1917, and of ten thousand words of wartime diaries. The translations will also be used in the University of Iowa Tractatus Map website, which enables readers to study and explore the book’s structure and development.