Digital Wittgenstein: Expanding Access to the Late Writings
Frederic Kettelhoit & Michele Lavazza
3rd November, 2026
@ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm GMT
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https://zoom.us/meeting/register/iO2D4QaFTvua3F8znDbWRw
About the Speaker
Abstract
Video
About the Speakers
Frederic Kettelhoit is a software developer and philosopher with an interest in making Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings more accessible online. He studied computer science and philosophy before writing his Ph.D. on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. During his research stay at the Wittgenstein Archives Bergen, he worked extensively with the source transcriptions and metadata. His current research interests include inconsistency and self-reference in computer science and philosophy.
Michele Lavazza is a translator, digital humanities enthusiast, learning technologies specialist, and free culture advocate. He holds a Master’s Degree in philosophy from the University of Milan; his thesis on Wittgenstein and transcendental philosophy was partly written in Milan and partly at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He founded the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project in 2020.
M. Lavazza. “The Copyright Status of Wittgenstein’s Works”, in Wittgenstein-Studien, vol. 14, no. 1, Jun. 2023, pp. 153–183, doi:10.1515/witt-2023-0009.
M. Lavazza. “Redrawing and publishing the graphics in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass”, in Wittgenstein-Studien, vol. 16, no. 1, Aug. 2025, pp. 245–276, doi:10.1515/witt-2025-0011.
M. Lavazza, “Wittgenstein in the Public Domain”, in Contributions/Beiträge to International Wittgenstein Symposium 2023: 100 Years of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — 70 Years after Wittgenstein’s Death. A Critical Assessment, edited by A. Pichler, E. Heinrich-Ramharter, F. Stadler, 2023.
Abstract
This talk will present the new “Wittgenstein’s (Late) Writings” website in the context of other digital resources aiming to expand the availability of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and edited writings.
The W(L)W website provides normalised, reader-friendly transcriptions of the Nachlass items dating from 1937 onwards (that is, starting from the time Wittgenstein transitioned from working on the Brown Book to working on what would become the Philosophical Investigations).
The new website’s goal—making Wittgenstein’s writings more accessible and readable while putting the Nachlass itself, rather than the “works”, in the spotlight—will be clarified by arguing that it is complementary to both the philologically accurate and meta-textually rich transcriptions published by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen and the multilingual reading editions published by the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project.
The website’s content, interface, and features will be briefly showcased before addressing the editorial choices that were made while designing and building it and the challenges that were met along the way. Because these challenges are partly due to the sheer size of the Nachlass, the strategies and tools that were used to automate some of the editorial work will be addressed explicitly; and a comparison will be drawn to the procedures adopted by the LWP to edit and translate texts, which rely on the work done manually by the LWP’s community of volunteers.
To conclude, an update will be shared about the translations and original-language editions that the LWP has recently published or is currently working on.
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