Prefatory note to the Frege-Wittgenstein correspondence

Juliet Floyd

pp. 1-14

in: Enzo de Pellegrin (ed), Interactive Wittgenstein, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

The historical record concerning Wittgenstein was significantly augmented in June 1988, when around five hundred letters to him, from a variety of correspondents—including Georg Trakl, Bertrand Russell, and many others—were discovered in the store room of a real-estate broker in Vienna. The woman who had been ordered to dispose of the old papers noticed the name "Wittgenstein" and stopped to examine them just before they were shredded.² Among this trove, now housed at the Brenner Archives at the University of Innsbruck, were twenty-one letters from Frege to Wittgenstein. The first is dated 11 October 1914, the last 3 April 1920. These form the entire correspondence between them that is presently known still to exist.

Cited authors

Frege Gottlob

Russell Bertrand

Wittgenstein Ludwig

Trakl Georg