Wittgensteins Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition

“Readers can, for the first time, observe the philosopher at work, transferring paragraphs from pocket notebooks to handwritten `volumes'; picking acceptable remarks to be included in type-scripts that are, at a later stage, cut up into slips of paper which are again annotated, rearranged and put together in further volumes and type-scripts.”
--Herbert Hrachovec,
Institut für Philosophie,
University of Vienna
"Wittgenstein on line/on the line"

Database Languages: German (Some English)

Contents: The Bergen Electronic Edition of the complete Wittgenstein Nachlass (from 1914 to 1950), including all of Wittgenstein's unpublished manuscripts, typescripts, dictations, and most of his notebooks. The Nachlass was catalogued by G. H. von Wright in his The Wittgenstein Papers, first published in 1969, and later updated and included as a chapter with the same title in his book Wittgenstein, published by Blackwell (and by the University of Minnesota Press in the U.S.) in 1982. 

Customers may elect to purchase either the text-only version, or the text and images version, which contains over 20,000 facsimile images of the actual pages of the manuscripts, typescripts and notebooks.

The CD-ROM version of the Nachlass contains both diplomatic and normalized transcriptions of the approximately 150 manuscripts, typescripts and dictations left by Wittgenstein in various stages of revision at the time of his death. The diplomatic version retains as much detail from the original as possible, including deletions, overwritings, substitutions, and spelling mistakes. The normalized version provides a 'reading' version of the texts by rendering only the last alternative of undecided substitutions and by correcting the spelling. It omits details such as deleted and overwritten text. 

The web version of the Nachlass, available to institutions, contains only the normalized text. Customers who purchase the Campus-wide license for web access to the text-only version will also receive the CD (text-only) version of the papers, which includes both the diplomatic and normalized versions.  Every online user will therefore have the ability to check the normalized text against the diplomatic transcription on CD. (For additional cost, institutional web customers can also purchase the 5 CD package of facsimile images. Please read notes below)

The Bergen edition of Wittgensteins Nachlass is the result of 10 years of academic research and editorial work by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. The electronic product is a joint publication of Oxford University Press and the Wittgenstein Archives.

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