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Allan Janik, "Wittgenstein at the Brenner Archives"

Allan Janik gives his second guest lecture in connection with his research stay at the Wittgenstein Archives and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen. Everyone welcome!

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About the Brenner Archives

The Brenner-Archives (FIBA) is a research institute and project platform bringing together philosophy, literature, editorial philology and text technology. One of its major publications is the Wittgenstein Briefwechsel: the Innsbruck Correspondence Edition (ICE, InteLex 2004). Since this first comprehensive electronic edition of Wittgenstein’s letters a group of researchers at FIBA (under the direction of Allan Janik) has been engaged in projects focusing on the investigation of new ways of electronic editing in humanities by applying state-of-the-art technologies and methods (such as computer-supported content analysis and XML/TEI).Thereby, they explore key questions challenging the hitherto existing ways of carrying on research, and thus discover new perspectives on editing texts in context.

Electronic-based Wittgenstein projects at FIBA include the FWF financed Culture and Value Revisited (CV, 2006-2008), the Innsbruck Correspondence Edition (ICE, 1996-2004) and the Lectures on Aesthetics Contextualized (LC, 2008-2012). The methods of historical-bibliographical commentary developed at FIBA over the years is the basis of these editions, which include links to the source manuscripts. This new version of these classical texts provides scholars with significantly enhanced and highly flexible access to them and aims a deepening our understanding of the cultural dimension in Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings on the one hand and the philosophical significance of his correspondence on the other.

This approach thus links the Bergen Electronic Edition (BEE) of Wittgenstein’s philosophical papers to the Brenner Archive’s electronic edition of Wittgenstein’s complete correspondence (ICE).

The Wittgenstein research group at FIBA aims to create a fully navigable electronic corpus of passages in Wittgenstein’s writings dealing with the matters of culture, aesthetics, psychoanalysis and religion. Thematically linked segments of Wittgenstein’s thought will be available for systematic investigations by philosophers, historians of philosophy, cultural historians, philologists and social scientists. This tool will support scholars in searching, navigating and understanding textual sources.

(Reports from two of the abovementioned projects are attached on the right of this page.)