Alois Pichler
Some ways of using the Bergen Wittgenstein Archives’ resources and tools for Tractatus Nachlass research
With an addendum on how computational ontology can be utilized for researching the Vienna Circle’s reception of the Tractatus
My presentation consists of three parts. (i) After a brief overview of Tractatus genesis, I will present the items that are open access available for the study of Tractatus genesis on websites offered by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) and partners (http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/, http://wittgensteinonline.no/, http://wab.uib.no/sfb and http://wittfind.cis.lmu.de/). These items include Nachlass items Ts-201a1 (1913), Ts-201a2 (1913), Ms-301 (1914), Ms-101 (1914), Ms-102 (1914-15), Ms-104 (1915?-18), Ms-103 (1916-17), Ts-204 (1918), Ts-202 (1918), Ts-203 (1919), as well as the Ostwald print (1922), the typescript with the English translation by Ramsey (a.o.) (1921-22), Ogden’s list of questions (1922), and the proofs of the bilingual edition (1922). (ii) Then I will give concrete demos of how these resources which include facsimiles, transcriptions, metadata and advanced search and analysis tools can be put to use for studying the Tractatus genesis and its documents. Among the possibilities are various edition formats, chronological sorting of the texts, several filtering options, advanced text search and metadata driven browsing of the documents. (iii) Finally, I will focus on the post-Tractatus period and give an example of how use of semantic technologies can help studying agreement and disagreement in the Vienna Circle reception of the Tractatus. My touch stone and empirical data will be provided by Rose Rand’s “Entwicklung der Thesen des ‘Wiener Kreises’” (item “Wiener Kreis Protokolle” RC 081-07-01 in University of Pittsburgh ULS Archives & Special Collections, Rudolf Carnap Papers).
Alois Pichler is professor of philosophy at the University of Bergen and director of its Wittgenstein Archives. He is the author of several publications in the fields of Wittgenstein research and digital humanities. He is the current editor of the Wittgenstein Archives' editions of Wittgenstein's Nachlass and has initiated and curates open access Wittgenstein research platforms such as wittgensteinsource.org and wittgensteinonline.no. Google scholar profile: https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=CQ0KNfgAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao.