General note on MSS 105–122 (Bände I to XVIII)
Between 1929 and 1940 Wittgenstein produced 18 large manuscript volumes. He himself numbered them as Bände I to XVIII and gave most of them general titles like “Philosophical Remarks” or “Philosophical Grammar”. This indicates that he himself perceived these volumes as belonging to a series. Some of them evidently contain new material spontaneously written down and not drafted in other notebooks. Parts of several of these volumes, however, are based on earlier remarks recorded in pocket notebooks, for example, while other parts contain revisions of earlier manuscript volumes or typescripts. The best–known case of this last kind are MSS 114ii and 115i (Bände X and XI), which contain a revision (erste Umarbeitung) of parts of TS 213 (The Big Typescript). The same typescript forms the basis of the first section of volume XII (MS 116), but the process of selecting remarks from the TS and transferring them into Band XII is such that most people would not feel inclined to speak of a process of revision. At any rate, there are clear breaks between the earlier portion of MS 114 and the subsequent revision of TS 213 contained in the same ledger as well as between the first half (winter 1933–34) of volume XI and its second half, which was written in the late summer and the autumn of 1936 (containing the German revision of the Brown Book, entitled “Philosophische Untersuchungen”).
General note on MSS 105–114 (Bände I to X)
There are good reasons for treating the series of volumes from I to X (or, more exactly, up to MS 114i) as forming a separate, or separable, part of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre. However, as has been pointed out above, even these volumes were not produced according to one uniform pattern. Some of the remarks were written spontaneously, as it were, that is to say, without a basis in earlier drafts. Other remarks contained in these volumes were copied or transferred in revised form from earlier writings. Most of these volumes are punctuated by personal remarks of a private or confessional nature as well as by reflections on music, literature, religion, and a few other kinds of topic. Sometimes, but by no means always, these reflections are separated from the more straightforwardly philosophical material by certain marks (e.g. “||…||”) or by being written in Wittgenstein’s usual code. But in spite of these and other qualifications that might come to mind it is helpful and surely not misleading to view volumes I to X as the central record of Wittgenstein’s strikingly original and continuous production between his return to Cambridge in January 1929 and a new stage in the process of articulating and arranging his ideas. But even if we are agreed that these ten manuscript volumes are to be regarded as the core record of his thought during the early middle period of his philosophical development, it will be useful to divide this material into three parts, corresponding to interruptions of the writing process motivated by an urge to have his handwritten remarks typed up. Once in possession of a typed version, Wittgenstein was prepared to think about the order of his individual remarks, about possible arrangements and re-arrangements. Moreover, he could now proceed to actually carrying out such arrangements and re-arrangements by way of cutting typescript or carbon copy into fragments that were subsequently put together in a new order and, in some cases, supplemented by handwritten changes or explanations or exemplifications giving the older material a new twist. — There are three interruptions of the kind alluded to in the previous paragraph:
MS 107 III. Philosophische Betrachtungen
MS 107 (Band III) forms the immediate continuation of MS 105ii (verso pages of vol. I). The page numbering is straightforward from 1 to 300. There is an interruption, however, on p. 229 (4 December 1929), and this interruption coincides with Wittgenstein’s Christmas vacation (spent in Vienna). Evidently, when departing for Austria he left his current manuscript volume in Cambridge. Once in Vienna, he began to use a new manuscript volume (MS 108, vol. IV). After his return to Cambridge, however, he went back to the earlier volume (MS 107) and filled its last 70 pages between 10 January (p. 229) and 15 February (p. 300). So, if one wishes to read Wittgenstein’s manuscript remarks in their chronological order, one should, upon reaching p. 229 of Band III, turn to Band IV to peruse the first 64 pages of this manuscript volume (13 December 1929 to 5 January 1930).
The first date to be found in MS 107 is “11 September” (p. 87). Regular dating begins on p. 153 (6 October 1929).
This volume contains a great number of general and personal reflections; a surprising proportion of these is not contained in Georg Henrik von Wright's collection Culture and Value. Among these general or personal remarks, there is a long sequence of reflections on the point of keeping a journal (pp. 74–6), and there are characteristic observations on what would constitute Wittgenstein’s ideal, or cultural ideal, as well as equally characteristic comparisons with Mendelssohn. — There is an extended dream narrative on pp. 219–22 (1 December 1929).
Philosophically, many of the remarks in this volume deal with Wittgenstein’s chief concerns typical of this period of his life: the possibility of a phenomenological language, visual space, questions arising in the areas of number theory and arithmetic, generality, the roles played by various types of rule and the ongoing conflict between extensional and intensional approaches to our notion of the infinite. The analogy between distinct “spaces” of experience and the contrast between a screen picture, on the one hand, and the corresponding picture(s) on a strip of film, on the other, is developed. Other topics are verification, Galton’s photographs, potential uses of the subject-predicate form, sense-data and sensations (pain), hypotheses, expectation.
Authors referred to include (besides Frege, Russell, Ramsey) Einstein as well as Ogden and Richards.
Much of this material can be found in Philosophical Remarks, and a fair number of the remarks contained in this manuscript volume were published in Culture and Value.