Moore’s Notes on Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933: Text, Context, and Content

Authors

  • David G. Stern University of Iowa
  • Gabriel Citron University of Oxford
  • Brian Rogers Stanford University

Keywords:

20th century philosophy, Wittgenstein Ludwig, Moore George Edward, text editing

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s writings and lectures during the first half of the 1930s play a crucial role in any interpretation of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. G. E. Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures, 1930-1933, offer us a remarkably careful and conscientious record of what Wittgenstein said at the time, and are much more detailed and reliable than previously published notes from those lectures.

The co-authors are currently editing these notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures for a book to be published by Cambridge University Press. We describe the materials that make up Moore’s notes, explain their unique value, review the principal editorial challenges that these materials present, and provide a brief outline of our editorial project.

Author Biographies

David G. Stern, University of Iowa

David G. Stern is a Professor of Philosophy and a Collegiate Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. His research interests include the history of analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Wittgenstein on mind and language (Oxford University Press, 1995). He is also a co-editor of Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, with Béla Szabados (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, with Hans Sluga (Cambridge University Press, 1996.) A second, extensively revised, edition of The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein is being prepared, for which he is writing a chapter on “Wittgenstein in the 1930s.”

Gabriel Citron, University of Oxford


Gabriel Citron is a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. His research interests include the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and Wittgenstein. In addition to co-editing Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures, he is also engaged in other related editing projects. These include: an edition of Wittgenstein’s marginalia, which is in its early stages; and two sets of student notes of Wittgenstein’s philosophical discussions, forthcoming in Mind: “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Conversations with Rush Rhees (1939-50): from the notes of Rush Rhees” and “A Discussion Between Wittgenstein and Moore on Certainty (1939): from the notes of Norman Malcolm.”

Brian Rogers, Stanford University

Brian Rogers received his PhD in philosophy from the Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. He has interests in early analytic philosophy, philosophy of logic, and philosophical methodology. In his dissertation, Philosophical Method in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, he argued that several philosophical methods are found in Wittgenstein’s final writings. His publications include “Tractarian First-Order Logic: Identity and the N-Operator,” The Review of Symbolic Logic, 5(4) (co-authored with Kai Wehmeier). He is currently a J.D. candidate at Stanford University.

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Published

2013-03-26

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2013): Volume 2 / Number 1 (Aug 2013), A. Pichler, S. Säätelä, Y. Neuman (eds.)

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From the Archives

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