The most complete treatment to date of Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics, this book refutes a common view that it is a relatively minor, tangential work. Indeed, it is unique as Wittgenstein’s sole work focused on ethics and his only lecture to a non-academic audience, The Heretics. Both make the Lecture on Ethics an accessible and personal account of the moral perspective of one of the most remarkable philosophers of the 20th century. The editors have collected all the known drafts of the lecture, including the earliest. They prove that the lecture was neither a perfunctory nor ad hoc work of the moment as sometimes thought, but underwent substantive, careful revision. Presented in its entirety, with all of Wittgenstein’s emendations preserved, scholars can now trace every detail of the development of this most unusual work. The editors propose for the first time that an alternative version of the lecture was read by Wittgenstein to the 1929 meeting of the free-thinking society, The Heretics.
The volume includes two essays explaining the origin of the lecture and the moral perspective it unfolds. The process of its development reveals that it is not at heart a thesis about language and ethics. Instead, Wittgenstein describes the way in which one approaches the ethical in wonder, rather than in the search for explanations. This major addition to the literature on Wittgenstein makes his Lecture on Ethics accessible to a wider readership and affirms its status as the expression of Wittgenstein’s enduring view of ethics.
