Remarks on Bernays vs. Wittgenstein

Abstract

After his philosophical breakthrough, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921), and
before his late masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein
published next to nothing. This does not mean to say that he was short of
philosophical inspiration during the thirty years from the early 1920s until the
early 1950s. On the contrary, his unpublished work includes an immense amount of
insightful and interesting material. Because of its fragmentary and partly unfinished
nature, however, it is not always easy to relate this material to Wittgenstein's
published contributions. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein also left behind material that
was more or less ready for publication. For example, the first part of the posthumous
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956, hereafter: RFM) is an exact replica
of Wittgenstein's original text. Also the sixth part of the second edition (1967) is
almost the same as its original. The rest of the book consists of different kinds of
materials from different periods of time.