Enzo De Pellegrin, ed.: Interactive Wittgenstein: Essays in Memory of Georg Henrik von Wright.

Ribeiro, Nuno

Enzo De Pellegrin, ed.

Interactive Wittgenstein: Essays in Memory of Georg Henrik von Wright.

Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer 2011.

xi + 208 pages

US$139.00 (cloth ISBN 978-1-4020-9908-3)

Studies on the work of Wittgenstein are characterized not only by an effort to interpret the concepts outlined throughout the philosopher's works--either by understanding the development of those concepts in Wittgenstein's writings or by juxtaposing his works with those of other philosophers, intellectuals, and artists--but also by the philological issues concerning the so-called Nachlass. Among the scholars who devoted their academic work to the study of Wittgenstein's thought, Georg Henrik von Wright, one of the original legatees of Wittgenstein's literary estate, played a crucial role in the development of both the interpretative and philological fields. The book Interactive Wittgenstein--Essays in Memory of Georg Henrik von Wright, edited by Enzo De Pellegrin, pays homage to the interpretative and philological academic work developed by von Wright. The book edited by Pellegrin contains seven sections: a preface contextualizes von Wright's work on Wittgenstein and assesses its importance and provides a brief description of the contributions contained in the book. The first three chapters of the book concern the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence; the final four contain interpretative essays about different dimensions of Wittgenstein's work.

In the first chapter, entitled "Prefatory Note to the Frege-Wittgenstein Correspondence", Juliet Floyd offers a historical contextualization of the correspondence from Frege to Wittgenstein, discovered in 1988, with reference to the philological work of Heinrich Scholz, a professor who began to catalogue Frege's writings in the mid-1930s. The "Prefatory Note" also presents a "Chronology of the Known Frege-Wittgenstein Correspondence", which not only contextualizes the extant letters but also presents the existing evidence for the contents of that part of the correspondence which is presumed lost, a useful tool for the study of the dialogue between Frege and Wittgenstein.

The second chapter, entitled "Frege-Wittgenstein Correspondence", contains the extant twenty-one letters from Frege to Wittgenstein, along with two letters exchanged between Scholz and Wittgenstein in 1936 about this correspondence. These letters are presented in the original German with an English translation, which was undertaken by Burton Dreben and Juliet Floyd. The English translation and the elucidatory footnotes provide an instrument for the Englishspeaking academic world. The two final letters exchanged between Scholz and Wittgenstein present a valuable testimony to how Wittgenstein himself considered his own correspondence with Frege.

The third chapter, entitled "The Frege-Wittgenstein Correspondence: Interpretive Themes", contains an essay written by Juliet Floyd about the main topics developed in the letters presented in the second section. Floyd begins by emphasizing the historical value of these letters, which according to her testify not only to the intellectual exchange between two great philosophers, but also to the nature of the relationship between Frege and Wittgenstein, which is an ambivalent relationship characterized, initially, by mutual admiration and, later (in 1919 1920), by a severe criticism on both thinkers' part, despite the thankful reference to Frege in the preface of the Tractatus. To understand the nature of the ambivalent relationship between Frege and Wittgenstein, Floyd divides the essay into two parts: the first is concerned with biographical aspects, the second with philosophical issues.

In the first part of her essay Floyd presents an analysis of the two letters Scholz and Wittgenstein exchanged in 1936. The question is why Wittgenstein refused Scholz access to his correspondence with Frege. According to Floyd, the ostensible reason cited by Wittgenstein, which is that the correspondence had been strictly personal and not philosophical, contrasts with the content of the letters, or Frege's four final ones at least, which contain detailed criticisms of the Tractatus. This fact leads Floyd to the conclusion that, despite the personal content of some letters, the reason Wittgenstein refused access to the letters was the polemics their release could generate concerning his first philosophy, which was already surpassed by Wittgenstein's new way of thinking in 1936.

The second part of Floyd's essay presents the discussion of the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence in the context of the concepts developed in the works of the two philosophers. As Floyd says in the opening paragraph of her essay, "It is unlikely that these missives will of themselves radically reshape our understanding of either [Wittgenstein and Frege]" (75). It is only in the context of the two philosophers' works that the significance of the letters stands revealed. Floyd explains that Frege's criticisms of the Tractatus are based on a profound scission between Frege and Wittgenstein concerning the notion of clarity and the relation between logic and truth. For Frege, the understanding of logic presupposes the notion of recognition of truth, while Wittgenstein's Tractatus presents logic as something which clarifies what it is for a sentence to express sense, whether true or false.

The fourth chapter is by Eran Guter and entitled "'A Surrogate for the Soul': Wittgenstein and Schoenberg". This essay, which discusses Wittgenstein's attitude towards modern music, argues that, despite several attempts to compare Schoenberg's dodecaphonic compositional procedures with Wittgenstein's attempt to attain purity in language, there is a radical difference in their understanding of music. This might well explain why there are neither references to Schoenberg in Wittgenstein's Nachlass nor references to Wittgenstein in Schoenberg's literary estate. Guter's essay considers Wittgenstein's remarks about modern music in the context of a reading of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and also the discussion about music in Wittgenstein's own time presented in the works of Heinrich Schenker. The latter, according to Guter, led Wittgenstein to adopt a hostile and pessimistic attitude towards modern music and to reject atonality as a symptom of decline in the grammar of musical language. The essay contains relevant information regarding the context of Wittgenstein's remarks on music and thereby provides important clues for future studies about Wittgenstein and the music of his time.

The fifth chapter is entitled "The Crash of the Philosophy of the Tractatus: The Testimony of Wittgenstein's Notebooks in October 1929". This essay, written by Jaakko Hintikka, provides a commented translation of some of the most relevant passages of Wittgenstein's notebooks from the years 1929-1930 concerning the abandonment of the phenomenological language. Defending the existence of a phenomenological point of view present in the Tractatus, Hintikka argues that Wittgenstein's definitive abandonment of phenomenology occurs in October 1929 with the critique of the notion of 'the immediately given'. Hintikka considers Wittgenstein's assumption that 'the immediately given is a state of constant flux' (162) as the turning-point from a phenomenological language to a physicalistic language. This is an interesting essay for all those who intend to study the so-called "Middle Wittgenstein" and the connections of this period to other periods of Wittgenstein's production.

The sixth chapter is by David Pears and is entitled "Linguistic Regularity". In this essay Pears presents a study of the notion of linguistic regularity and its development in the philosophy of Wittgenstein. According to Pears, Wittgenstein's later treatment of linguistic regularity constitutes a rejection of the picture-theory present in the Tractatus. The sense of a word, in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, is no longer determined by a single application of a word, but by its usage. Pears thus argues that the key for understanding Wittgenstein's later treatment of meaning and linguistic regularity is Protagoras's idea that the man is the measure of all things.

In the seventh and final chapter, "On a Remark by Jukundus", Joachim Schulte presents some considerations about what may be called Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion. In this essay Schulte provides an interpretation of Wittgenstein's commentary, presented in Culture and Value, concerning a remark by Jukundus, the protagonist of Gottfried Keller's The Lost Laugh, according to which religion consists in knowing if things are going well for a person. Schulte provides an interpretation of the remark in the context of Wittgenstein's philosophical and literary readings about religion, arguing, through the analysis of some of Wittgenstein's most fundamental remarks concerning religious experience, that access to religion means access to different kinds of pictures--'religious pictures'--that produce different effects in accordance with different levels of religiosity. This article is an important contribution for those who intend to study the relation between religion and philosophical thought in the work of Wittgenstein.

The multiplicity of perspectives presented in Interactive Wittgenstein ensures that the book offers a useful addition to studies about Wittgenstein. Considering that the book is edited in memory of Georg Henrik von Wright, however, it could have devoted more pages to the elucidation and discussion of the historical importance of the interpretative and philological works of this thinker.

Nuno Ribeiro

Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos / FAPESP