Addendum

In his catalogue of Wittgenstein’s literary remains, G. H. von Wright makes a joint comment on TSS 222–4, the ultimate sources for Part I of the posthumous Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. He explains that “[t]he reason for distinguishing these as three different items, although they all stem from 221, is that Wittgenstein himself separated 223 and 224 from the main body of cuttings comprising 222”. ¹ Immediately before, von Wright writes that “[o]f TS 221 two copies exist more or less intact”, but “[n]either of them is a top copy”, the reason being that “[t]he top copy was evidently used for composing 222”. ² In another study, von Wright expands this commentary saying that “[t]he cuttings he clipped together in a large number of bunches” and that “[t]here are numerous changes and annotations in handwriting on the cuttings”. ³ Further pieces of information are given in the preface to the Remarks by von Wright, Rush Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe, part of which deserves to be quoted at length:

The last section of the rearranged collection [TS 222, 136–47 (256–66 in Wittgenstein’s pagination)] consisted of papers that had not been cut up, though there were many manuscript additions, and it is not quite clear whether Wittgenstein regarded them as belonging with the preceding text. This section deals with the concept of negation …. Its content occurs in great part in the “Investigations” §§547–568. The editors left it out of the first edition, but have included it here as Appendix I to Part I.

The collection had two further appendices. They come from the same typescript as the second half of the (earlier) “Investigations”; nevertheless they were separated from the rest of the collection of clippings. The first [TS 224] deals with “mathematical surprise”. The second [TS 223] discusses among other things Gödel’s theories of the existence of unprovable but true propositions in the system of “Principia Mathematica”. In the first edition we included only the second appendix, but here both are published (Appendices II and III). ⁴

It becomes clear from these passages that the editors of the Remarks were not sure about the insertion of the “appendices” in this work, the 1956 edition including only TS 223. Like pages 256–66 of TS 222, both TS 223 and TS 224 were clipped together, as can be seen from the marks on the paper, but similar marks also appear on other pages or cuttings in TS 222, a document that is described by von Wright, Rhees and Anscombe precisely as a “collection of clippings”. The particular place occupied by TSS 223 and 224 is therefore problematic. The first forms a continuous block from page 246 to page 255, none of these having been cut up. Some pages include corrections by the author but others are clean. TS 224, in its turn, is made of pages 205–7 and 213 as well as cuttings from pages 204, 208, 212 and 214–15, most of them with corrections.