The Wittgenstein Lectures-2019 Update Cambria
Updated version: September 2019 James C. Klagge Public and Private Occasions [[p. 331]] Chapter 3: The Wittgenstein Lectures Just as we have a catalogue of Wittgenstein’s papers, it would be useful to have a guide to Wittgenstein’s lectures. It would be useful to know when he gave lectures, where and to whom, and on what topics, and more specifically what he said. Since his lectures, unlike his papers, have no enduring existence, they are harder to study. Nevertheless, we have evidence about his lectures—comments he made in letters, notes he made in preparation, recollections and notes from his listeners and friends, official records and minutes, diary entries, and so forth. Though Wittgenstein nearly always lectured extemporaneously, the lectures were preceded by enormous preparation, and Wittgenstein took them very seriously. As Norman Malcolm has reported (1984, p. 48), Wittgenstein “said that he had always regarded his lectures as a form of publication.” And Casimir Lewy recalled: “Wittgenstein once said to me that ‘to publish’ means ‘to make public’, and that therefore lecturing is a form of publication” (1976, p. xi). Yorick Smythies, who probably attended more of Wittgenstein’s lectures than any other student, wrote the following in a draft of an introduction to a planned publication of Wittgenstein’s lectures (Smythies 2017, xi): Re-reading [these notes], now, after thirty years, I find them more natural, fluent, simple, continuous, expressive, than the remarks contained in Wittgenstein’s so-far published writings. While he was lecturing, he was not able to delete what had been said, or to give to trains of thought more tightness than they were showing themselves to have.
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