Educational Philosophy and Theory
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: [Link]/journals/rept20
Aphorisms, waste-books and the philosophy of short
forms: Wittgenstein and Lichtenberg
Michael A. Peters
To cite this article: Michael A. Peters (2022) Aphorisms, waste-books and the philosophy
of short forms: Wittgenstein and Lichtenberg, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54:12,
1960-1967, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2022.2118515
To link to this article: [Link]
Published online: 13 Sep 2022.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 1138
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
[Link]
Educational Philosophy and Theory
2022, VOL. 54, NO. 12, 1960–1967
[Link]
Editorial
Aphorisms, waste-books and the philosophy of short
forms: Wittgenstein and Lichtenberg
A page from Newton’s Waste book
Cambridge Digital Library, [Link]
2. It’s a question whether in the arts and science a best is possible beyond which our under-
standing cannot go. Perhaps this point is infinitely distant, notwithstanding that with every
closer approximation we have less in front of us. (p. 3)
7. If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful for us in life, or if we want to
draw up universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract
from that which introduces too much diversity ion our contemplations –somewhat as we often
do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so
that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least to replace such properties with
a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestable introduce a large measure of uncertainty into
these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss from our minds and turn our attention only
to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain prop-
ositions of the Stoic philosophy. (p. 4)
The Waste-Books, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, trans. with Introduction and Notes by R.J.
Hollingdale, New York Review of Books, 2000 (Notebook A 1765-1770).
© 2022 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Educational Philosophy and Theory 1961
Ancient wisdom in aphorisms
1. ‘Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult.
The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make
the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.’ - Hippocrates (400 B.C.E.), Aphorisms.
2. The word dates back in the ancient Greek language to aphorismos deriving from the
verb aphorizo, meaning to mark off, to divide, or to distinguish; From 1520s in English
as ‘concise statement of a principle’, distinguished some other short forms by 1580s.
3. As both a physician and philosopher Hippocrates emphasized the human virtues, ancient
wisdom tempered by the principles of observation.
4. ‘The first aphorism of Hippocrates, in its original form, has a harmonic composition,
resembling a poem. Aphorisms are formed in the context of scientific, philosophic, and
artistic works… Hippocrates suggested that physicians develop their own philosophy.
Aphoristic statements by Hippocrates convey accumulated wisdom, speculation, and
maturity in medical practice.’ Antoniou et al (2012).
5. Hippocrates’ Aphorisms were very popular in the Ancient world. In a pre-print world they
provided a model of practice known by heart and easily memorised even by school
children and were translated into Hebrew several times (and into Arabic) (Bos, 2019).
6. The aphorism became known as a concise and eloquent expression of a principle or
truth to constitute a philosophical genre in the wisdom literature in the Ancient world:
Delphi maxims of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the many different kinds of Sūtra in
Sanskrit literature (circa 500-200 B.C), Biblical Ecclesiastes, Islamic hadiths, Pythagoras’
Golden Verses, Hebraic and Yiddish sayings, and ancient aphorisms in Confucianism,
Buddhist thought and Taoism.
7. Ancient aphorisms are near-universal and are part of the philosophy of short forms
including sayings, proverbs, poems (haiku, tanku), remarks, adages, brocards, chiamus,
epigrams, epithaphs, maxims, aperçu, hypomnema, mantras, parables, and platitudes.
The classical aphorism, often the sayings of sages, were collections that were therapeutic
in nature to rid us of unnecessary suffering so that we could lead the good life
(eudaimonia). Epictetus’ The Enchiridion (135 A.C.E. trans. Elizabeth Carter), comprised of
numbered paragraphs, begins: ‘1. Some things are in our control and others not. Things
in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our
own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and,
in one word, whatever are not our own actions’, ([Link]
html).
8. The Golden Verses, a collection of moral precepts, attributed to Pythagoras, appearing
as early as the third century BCE, are 71 numbered statements, exhorting people ‘to
worship the immortal gods’, honour the ‘Terrestrial daemons’ and one’s parents, make
others distinguished by virtue your friend, avoid fault-finding, vanquish the passions of
gluttony, sloth, sensuality, and anger, ‘do nothing evil’ ‘but above all respect yourself’
(1-10).[Firth, (ed) 1904] Pythagoras’ teachings referenced the work of Anaximander,
Anaximenes and Pherecydes, with its combination of mathematics and experimental
method, had a widespread influence on the Greek and Christian worlds.
9. The ancient aphorisms in the Greek world were therapeutic, recording spiritual exercises
that established philosophy as a way of life (Hadot, 1995). Before Plato and the birth of
institutional philosophy the sayings of the pre-Socrates (Anaximander, Xenophanes,
Parmenides, Heraclitus) were the basis of ‘philosophy’, strongly attacked by Plato and
Aristotle in the transition from oracular to argumentative philosophy.
10. The Analects, meaning ‘selected sayings’, is one of the most widely read and studied
texts that continues to have a huge impact of East Asian culture and values. Written
during the Warring States period (475–221 BC) Confucius believed that people could
1962 EDITORIAL
develop an ethics of self-cultivation through ren or virtue (‘humaneness’ or how people
should treat one another, and especially one’s parents): ‘Confucius said: In the home the
young should behave with filial piety, and out in the world, with brotherly love. They
should be prudent and trustworthy. They should love all people and be close to the
benevolent. Having done so, their remaining strength should be used to learn literature’
(Chapter 1, Verse 6), [Link]
11. In A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter, Andrew Hui (2019) argues ‘[A]
phorisms are before, against, and after philosophy’ (p. 2) ‘at times an ancestor, at times
an ally, and at times an antagonist to systematic philosophy’ (p. 4). An aphorism ‘requires
interpretation’ (p. 5), ‘the shortest of forms to read–takes the longest time to understand
(p.6).
12. As John Gross (2003) demonstrates in his anthology an aphorism ‘can illuminate the
hidden truth, or lay bare the ironies of existence’, including the individual and the sense
of identity – desires & longings, fears, hopes, passions, self-knowledge, self-love, and
self-doubt (Gross, 2003).
13. In Signposts to elsewhere: a book of aphorisms, Yahia Lababidi (2019) writes: ‘There is a
Persian proverb that says: Epigrams succeed where epics fail.’ We seem to be living at
a historical moment where the grand narratives — truth, morality, life of the spirit —
seem to be failing to hold our attention or capture our imagination. I’m hoping the
humble aphorism, deceptively slight as it is, can do its quiet magic by helping us to
rethink the Big Questions: how we live, where we are heading, who we are becoming?
h t t p s : / / u n b o u n d. c o m / b o u n d l e s s / 2 0 1 9 / 1 1 / 0 7 / a r g u m e n t s - a n d - a p h o r i s m s - t h
e-ancient-art-of-the-pithy-bon-mot/
14. W H Auden and Louis Kronenberger: ‘An aphorism … must convince every reader that
it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irre-
spective of the reader’s convictions.’ (Auden & Kronenberger, 1981).
15. John Morley gave an address on ‘Aphorisms’ – an address delivered before the Edinburgh
Philosophical Institution, November 11, 1887, in which he wrote: ‘The essence of aphorism
is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying. It is the
very opposite of dissertation and declamation; its distinction is not so much ingenuity
as good sense brought to a point; it ought to be neither enigmatical nor flat, neither a
truism on the one hand, nor a riddle on the other. These wise sayings, said Bacon, the
author of some of the wisest of them, are not only for ornament, but for action and
business, having a point or edge, whereby knots in business are pierced and discovered.
And he applauds Cicero’s description of such sayings as saltpits,—that you may extract
salt out of them, and sprinkle it where you will. They are the guiding oracles which man
has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do,
to do without, and todepart.’ [Link]
94_an_address_delivered_before_the_Edinburgh_Philosophical_I nstitution,_
November_11,_1887
Lichtenberg and The Waste-Books
16. Collections of aphorisms were favoured and published by early modern authors: Erasmus’
(1500) Adagio (‘more haste, less speed’, ‘the blind leading the blind’, ‘A rolling stone
gathers no moss’); Baltasar Gracián’s (1647) The Art of Worldly Wisdom that embraces the
style of conceptualism characterized by ellipsis, agudeza (wit) and the minimum of form;
La Rochefoucauld’s (1678) Maximes; Pascal’s (1670) Pensées (‘Man is only a reed, the
weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed’, No. 200); and many others.
Educational Philosophy and Theory 1963
17. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, (Sudelbücher in German), was a collection
of 1085 aphorisms organised into notebooks (from A to L, covering the years 1765-1799).
[Lichtenberg, J. C. (2000) The Waste Books. trans. Hollingdale, R. J. New York Review of
Books. Reissued.]
18. ‘The body of this book consists of 1,085 aphorisms and other aphoristically brief
writings selected from the note-books Lichtenberg kept from his student days until
the end of his life as a depository for his thoughts, observations and memoranda to
himself. He called these volumes his Sudelbücher—a rendition of the English ‘waste
books’, a term employed in the English business house of the time to designate the
ledgers in which transactions of all kinds were entered as they occurred before being
transferred to the more orderly and neatly written account books… a single page
can include aphorisms, scientific jottings and sketches, linguistic experiments, phrases
that have struck the writer and appealed to him, quotations from books and maga-
zines, notes for future work, dates to be remembered, titles of books to be purchased;
what the Sudelbücher are not, however, are diaries— Lichtenberg also kept diaries,
and the orderly descriptions of the day-to-day events of his life they contain bear
no resemblance to the pages of the notebooks.’ Introduction, R.J. Hollingdale (2000,
p. v-vi)
19. Francis Bacon, with his interest in the management of knowledge, adopted the mercantile
model of waste-book and ledger in 1608 comparing his notebooks to waste books, (Vine,
2011, 2019)
20. ‘Bacon intended his private notebook to function “like a merchant’s waste book, where
to enter all manner of remembrancia of matter, service, business, study, touching myself,
service, others, either sparsim [scattered] or in schedules, without any manner of restraint,”’
(Harkness, 2008).
21. ‘[F]or aphorisms, except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and
heart of sciences; for discourse of illustration is cut off; recitals of examples are cut off;
discourse of connexion and order is cut off; descriptions of practice are cut off. So there
remaineth nothing to fill the aphorisms but some good quantity of observation: and
therefore no man can suffice, nor in reason will attempt, to write aphorisms, but he that
is sound and grounded.’ [Francis Bacon, 1605]
22. Isaac Newton received his Waste Book, as he termed it, from his stepfather (dated 1664),
in which he worked out some mathematical and optical calculations inspired by Descartes
and Wallis, and later the principles of his calculus (Newton’s Waste Book (MS Add. 4004),
Cambridge Digital Library, [Link]
23. ‘Much of Newton’s important work on calculus is developed in this large notebook,
which he began using in 1664 when he was away from Cambridge due to the plague.
Newton inherited the book from his stepfather, Rev Barnabas Smith, who used it from
about 1612 to record his own theological notes (see, for example, his notes on adultery,
in Latin). Newton was not interested in his stepfather’s jottings: its value to him was the
large number of blank pages, which he began filling with his mathematical and optical
calculations. Although the bulk of his work in this manuscript dates from the mid-1660s,
Newton continued to use into the 1680s and possibly even the 1690s.’ Cambridge Digital
Library, [Link]
24. Lichtenberg was the first experimental physicist at the University of Göttingen from 1767
and was known to be a great teacher, although his work in mathematics and experi-
mental science was of little consequence. Most of his literary output were for two journals
of which he was editor.
25. Lichtenberg’s aphorisms were inspirations to Nietzsche, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Heine,
Karl Kraus and Wittgenstein, defining a philosophical genre and style of German letters
that was emulated.
1964 EDITORIAL
26. R.J. Hollingdale, Lichtenberg’s translator, in blurb for his book indicates: ‘Lichtenberg’s
Waste Books have been greatly admired by writers as very different as Tolstoy, Einstein,
and Andre Breton, while Nietzsche and Wittgenstein acknowledged them as a significant
inspiration for their own radical work in philosophy,’ [Link]
Waste-Books-York-Review-Classics/dp/0940322501
27. ‘The epigram and the “sentence” or proverb are plainly related to the aphorism, the
character of the Romans and their language is equally plainly favorable to aphoristic
brevity, and all good writers have tended towards aphorism when they have wanted to
summarize an opinion: nonetheless the aphorism as a deliberately cultivated literary
form, as distinct from something said briefly, did not appear in European literature until
the Renaissance, when the aphoristic writings of Erasmus, Michelangelo, Paracelsus and
Bacon, but above all those of the line of French philosophers from Montaigne to Chamfort,
bestowed on it the distinctive character by which we now recognize it’. Introduction,
R.J. Hollingdale (2000, p. viii)
Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein
28. Georg Henrik von Wright (1967) writes: ‘By far the most valuable part of Lichtenberg’s literary
work, however, consisted of his "aphorisms," or scattered thoughts on psychological, philo-
sophical, scientific, and many other topics. They were written down in notebooks but were
never systematically arranged by the author.’ Perhaps his greatest contribution, apart from
the impact of his aphorisms on German style, was his conception of philosophy and its
impact on Wittgenstein, who while taking inspiration from Lichtenberg, modified and devel-
oped the genre into numbered remarks, many of which could stand alone, but most of which
were part and parcel of an implicitly organised overlapping set of family resemblances.
29. ‘Our entire philosophy is a correction of linguistic usage’ Lichtenberg is quoted as saying
(cited in Wright, 1967). Wright (1967) goes on to suggest ‘Philosophy, then, is a critique
of language’ and ‘The philosopher, then, speaks with the words of the common language
about things that are beyond it. He is thus compelled to express himself, to a certain
degree, in metaphors (Gleichnissen).’
30. Wright (1967) remarks finally: ‘It should be evident from the above that Lichtenberg
anticipated the conception of philosophy that has been represented in the twentieth
century by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein knew Lichtenberg’s work well and esteemed
it highly. It is hardly possible, however, to speak of Lichtenberg as an influence on the
philosophy of Wittgenstein’, although Wright speaks of a ‘rare congeniality’ between
them. [Wright, G.H. (1967) Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742–1799), [Link],
trans. David H. DeGrood and Barry J. Karp, [Link]
encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/lichtenberg-georg-christoph-1742-1799].
31. Others have noted such similarities: ‘Lichtenberg’s influence on Wittgenstein’s work went
deeper than mere content: the gnomic form of the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations
owes a great deal to the example of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms,’ (Kimball, 2002).
32. ‘A good expression is worth as much as a good thought, because it is almost impossible
to express oneself well without showing what is expressed in a good light’. (Lichtenberg,
Sudelbücher) (cited in Van Dam, 2013).
33. ‘I believe that my sentences are mostly descriptions of visual images that occur to me.
Lichtenberg’s wit is the flame that can burn on a pure candle only’ (Wittgenstein cited
in Van Dam, 2013: 103).
34. ‘It was during these early years at Gottingen that he began his lifelong habit …of keep-
ing “a Book wherein I write everything, as I see it or as my thoughts suggest it to me’,
(cited in Stern, 1959: 15)
Educational Philosophy and Theory 1965
Wittgenstein’s transformation of the philosophy of short forms
35. ‘I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: Philosophy ought really to
be written only as poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather
from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby
revealing myself as someone who cannot do what he would like to be able to do.’
(Wittgenstein, 1980: 24e).
36. ‘Lying to oneself about oneself, deceiving yourself about the pretence in your own state
of will, must have a harmful influence on [one’s] style; for the result will be that you
cannot tell what is genuine in style and what is false … If I perform to myself, then it’s
this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling
to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.’ (cited in Monk, 1991: 366-7).
37. Wittgenstein wonders on occasions whether he brings to life ‘new movements of thought’
or whether he simply applies old ones (Wittgenstein, 1980: 20e); he puzzles over his
ability to write prose and concludes that his ability has limits which are part of his
nature: ‘In this game I can only attain such and such a degree of perfection, I can’t go
beyond it’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 59e).
38. ‘One’s style of writing may be unoriginal in form — like mine — and yet one’s words
may be well chosen; or, on the other hand, one may have a style that’s original in form,
one that is freshly grown from deep within oneself’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 53e)
39. Wittgenstein believes that ‘the greatness of what a man writes depends on everything
else he writes and does’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 65e). There is a close link between ethics
and style for the mark of great style is originality, and originality is a moral attribute.
Speaking or expressing the truth is not a matter of cleverness: ‘No one can speak the
truth; if he has still not mastered himself…The truth can be spoken only by someone
who is already at home in it…’ (Wittgenstein, 1980: 35e).
40. Philosophy is not only a battle against the bewitchment of language, an investigation
of the ordinary and familiar with the aim of shewing ‘the fly the way out of the fly-bottle
(Wittgenstein, 2010, #309), it also necessarily involves work on the self (Wittgenstein,
1980: 16e)
41. An aspect of Wittgenstein’s work which has attracted growing attention is its language.
It would be surprising if he were not one day ranked among the classic writers of
German prose. The literary merits of the Tractatus have not gone unnoticed. The language
of the Investigations is equally remarkable. The style is simple and perspicuous, the
construction of sentences firm and free, the rhythm flows easily. The form is sometimes
that of dialogue, with questions and replies; sometimes, as in the Tractatus, it condenses
to aphorisms, (Wright, 1982: 33-34).
42. ‘The scope and character of Wittgenstein’s literary Nachlass, the so-called “Wittgenstein
Papers”, fall into three main groups: (a) the manuscripts (78), consisting of two strata
of writings “first drafts” and “more finished versions”; (b) the typescripts (34) which
were dictated or prepared by Wittgenstein himself; and (c) verbatim records of dicta-
tions (8) to colleagues or pupils (Wright, 1969: 485-86). Wright mentions two further
groups: the notes, more or less verbatim, of Wittgenstein’s conversations and lectures;
and his correspondence. Already, one might note that there is something extraordinary
about the amount he wrote, most of which was never published in his lifetime. He
agonised over the form and composition of his work and he developed very complex
methods of composition. He comments in Culture and Value that when he is thinking
about a topic he “jump[s] about all round it”: “Forcing my thoughts into an ordered
sequence is a torment for me …. I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making
an arrangement of my thoughts which may have no value at all” (CV, 28e)’ (Peters &
Burbules, 2002).
1966 EDITORIAL
43. An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been ‘deciphered’ when it has
simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an
art of exegesis. (Nietzsche, 2006/1887, Preface §8).
44. ‘In his first book of aphorisms, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1910/1886)
‘Nietzsche asks us to reflect on its Stückwerk quality– its status as piece-work, part-work,
patchwork, piecemeal, or as often alleged in a somewhat pejorative manner against
aphoristic texts – fragmentary’ (cited in Doering, 2012: 2).
45. ‘Nietzsche indeed wanted to be remembered: as Zarathrustra claims, “Whoever writes in
blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, but rather to be learned by heart” (35)’
(cited in Doering, 2012: 19).
46. ‘The reason to consider Nietzsche and Wittgenstein together is that their formidably
unique styles, rhetorics, and forms of expression – and most perhaps centrally, their
Stückwerk, aphoristic approaches – have forced their concepts into a profoundly azeo-
tropic relation to their texts’, (Doering, 2012: 14).
47. What of the methods and interpretation of aphoristic philosophy?
48. ‘In its pure and perfect form the aphorism is distinguished by four qualities occurring
together: it is brief, it is isolated, it is witty, and it is “philosophical.” Introduction, R.J.
Hollingdale (2000, p. viii).
49. ‘Lichtenberg’s fragmentary philosophy’ is only inconsequentially similar to that of
Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s. It is ‘misleading’ because ‘their thinking is only expressed
in fragmentary form whereas Lichtenberg’s really is fragmentary’ – what Hollingdale calls
‘variegated inconsequentiality’. Introduction, R.J. Hollingdale (2000, p. xi).
50. Wittgenstein was clearly inspired by Lichtenberg, though unlike Lichtenberg and Nietzsche,
he experiments and develops a distinctive aphoristic form as numbered ‘remarks’, first
in the saying-shown aphorisms of the Tractatus, and then in the pedagogical form of
the Investigations. He favours this pedagogical form because it allows him to ‘proceed
one from subject to another in a natural order and without breaks’ – based on family
resemblance of thoughts ‘connected to the very nature of the investigation’, as an art
of assembling reminders with the aim of moving from obscurity to clarity. Wittgenstein’s
aphoristic style is a move towards a perspicuous form informed by the notion that
thoughts –fragmentary by nature–occur as flashes of inspiration. They must be harvested
and recorded in notebooks. The recorded philosophical fragments, observations, and
other recorded items are then investigated for ‘family resemblances’ and are thematically
linked together. For me this resembles thought as it happens that can be expressed
clearly and concisely. Stylistics enter the choice of word and metaphor and the resulting
design is more a meandering stream across a flood plain than a river rushing to the
sea. It simulates the physiology and neuroscience of thought.
References
Antoniou, G. A., Antoniou, S. A., Georgiadis, G. S., & Antoniou, A. I. (2012). A contemporary perspective of the
first aphorism of Hippocrates, Historical Vignettes in Vascular Surgery 56(3), 866–868. [Link]
article/S0741-5214(12)01046-4/fulltext
Auden, W. H., & Kronenberger, L. (1981). Louis Viking Book of Aphorisms. Viking.
Bacon, F. (1605). The advancement of learning. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Advancement of Learning, by
Francis Bacon, [Link]
Bos, G. (2019). Maimonides, commentary on Hippocrates’ Aphorisms Volume 1. Brill.
Confucius, The Analects. [Link]
Doering, J. (2012). Philosophy in pieces: the aphorisms of Nietzsche’s human, all too human and Wittgenstein’s
philosophical investigations [Master of Arts thesis]. University of Waterloo.
Epictetus (135 ACE). The Enchiridion (Elizabeth Carter, Trans.). [Link]
Gracián, B. (2010/1647 orig.) The art of worldly wisdom (Joseph Jacobs, Trans.). Kessinger Publishing.
Educational Philosophy and Theory 1967
Gross, J. (2003). The Oxford book of aphorisms. OUP.
Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life. Wiley-Blackwell.
Harkness, D. E. (2008). Accounting for science. In M.C. Jacob & C. Secretan, (Eds.), The self-perception of early
modern capitalists. Palgrave Macmillan. [Link]
Hippocrates (400 B.C.E.). Aphorisms (Francis Adams, Trans.). [Link]
Hollingdale, R. J. (2000). Introduction, to Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). In The waste-books. New York Review
of Books.
Hui, Andrew. (2019). A theory of the aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter. Princeton UP.
Kimball, R. (2002). G. C. Lichtenberg: a ‘spy on humanity’, The New Criterion, [Link]
/5/g-c-lichtenberg-a-ldquospy-on-humanityrdquo
Lababidi, Y. (2019). Signposts to elsewhere: a book of aphorisms. [Link]
arguments-and-aphorisms-the-ancient-art-of-the-pithy-bon-mot/
Lichtenberg, G. C. (2000). The waste-books (trans. with Introduction and Notes by R.J. Hollingdale). New York
Review of Books.
Monk. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius. Penguin.
Morley, J. (1887). Aphorisms. [Link]
fore_the_Edinburgh_Philosophical_Institution,_November_11,_1887 Erasmus (1513) Adagio. Complete Latin text
online. [Link]
Nietzsche, F. (1910/1886). Human, all too human: A book for free spirits (trans. Helen Zimmern with Introduction
by J. M. Kennedy).
Nietzsche, F. (2006/1887 orig.). On the Genealogy of Morals, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson (trans. Carol Diethe
Cambridge UP.)
Pascal (1958/1670 orig.) Pensées. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pascal’s Pensées, by Blaise Pascal. [Link]
[Link]/files/18269/18269-h/[Link], 1958, Dutton.
Peters, M. A., & Burbules, N. (2002). Wittgenstein/Styles/Pedagogy, Theory and Science, [Link]
[Link]/content/vol003.001/[Link]
Pythagoras (1904). The Golden Verses of Pythagoras and Other Pythagorean Fragments, trans Florence Firth.,
Theosophical Publishing House.
Rochefoucauld, L. (2005). Maximes. Project Gutenberg’s Reflections, by Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld. https://
[Link]/files/9105/9105-h/[Link]
Stern, J. P. (1959). Lichtenberg: A doctrine of scattered occasions. Indiana University Press.
Van Dam, E. (2013). Wittgenstein Lights Lichtenberg’s Candle: Flashlights of Enlightenment in Wittgenstein’s
Thought. In Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer, and Daniel Steuer (Eds.), Wittgenstein reading. De Gruyter.
Vine (2019). Miscellaneous order: Manuscript culture and the early modern organization of knowledge. Oxford
Scholarship Online.
Vine, A. (2011). Commercial commonplacing: Francis Bacon, the waste-book, and the ledger. In R. Beadle, P. Beal,
C. Burrow & A. Edwards (Eds.), Manuscript miscellanies 1450-1700. English Manuscript studies 1100-1700 (pp.
197–218). The British Library. [Link]
Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and value. (CV) ed. G. H. Von Wright (in collaboration with Heikki Nyman) (trans.
Peter Winch).
Wittgenstein, L. (2010). Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, Joachim Schulte).
Wiley-Blackwell.
Wright, v G. H. (1969). Special supplement: The Wittgenstein papers. The Philosophical Review, 78(4), 483–503.
[Link]
Wright, & von, G. H. (1982). Wittgenstein in relation to his times. In B. McGuinness (Ed.), Wittgenstein and his times.
Basil Blackwell.
Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China
mpeters@[Link]
