No book influenced my attitude toward philosophy more than Wittgenstein's Blue Book. Here are a couple gems:

> The questions, "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substance for a substantive.)

> The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications, has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, “what is knowledge?” he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge. If I wished to find out what sort of thing arithmetic is, I should be very content indeed to have investigated the case of a finite cardinal arithmetic. For: (a) this would lead me on to all the more complicated cases, (b) a finite cardinal arithmetic is not incomplete, it has no gaps which are then filled in by the rest of arithmetic.

> Now I don't say that this is not possible. Only, putting it in this way immediately shows you that it need not happen. This, by the way, illustrates the method of philosophy.

Not quite all public domain. (in English) [0] (maybe? gray area)

I'd highly recommend checking out his work on (and coining of the term) "language games" [1] I'm not sure I agree with all of the thinking behind them, but it's a fascinating concept that has useful nuggets whether or not you agree with everything Wittgenstein says about them. They are explored pretty fully in his work "Philosophical Investigations" [2] This work pretty much set aside a fair amount of his thinking in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is still an interesting work in its own right. I think that even a cursory ELI5 treatment of this material in a standard college course would be very useful in arming students with tools needed to dissect language. I've used it (in brief) when teaching a course on Informal Logic in relation to propaganda.

[0] It seems copyright on the English translation might still be in effect, or at least a gray area of determination. Since it's a common text use in college courses I'm guessing the copyright owners may fight public domain release. The issue will be whether or not the translation was a work for hire or if it can be considered sufficiently different to constitute an original work. The English translation by Anscombe, Hacker, and Schulte occured posthumously, and so might not be considered work for hire. Hopefully it will resolve in favor of public domain. For a shorter consideration of "language games" check out Blue Book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Investigations-Ludwig-W...

Do we know what Wittgenstein himself would have thought of this? Did he have opinions on "intellectual property" regimes?

Did the "intellectual property" regime contemporaneous with him writing encourage or discourage his output?

I mean, there's some thought that Giuseppe Verdi reduced his output when copyright was introduced: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1336802

He said that someday philosophers would forget him and he would be discovered by others who would finally figure out what he was truly trying to say. May this be the start of that era.

"If you agree that there is a hand, we will grant you all the rest..."

From the tiny book "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein. Really interesting and thought-provoking.

ObMontyPythonReference[1]

"And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel."

[1]https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/Bruces%27_Philosophers_S...

Public domain? I thought it was private language

Wittgenstein in a lecture once asked his audience to imagine coming across a man who is saying “...5, 1, 4, 1, 3 — finished!”, and, when asked what he has been doing, replies that he has just finished reciting the complete decimal expansion of π backwards.

A. W. Moore, The Infinite, Routledge, 1990

I've heard that Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers to actually make people optimistic. Does anyone here feel that way?

Translations have their own copyright.

And so does the publisher for the design of the printed book.

So don't get too cocky copying books unless you understand the current status of various other possible copyrights you might be violating.

Very strange-- it took me straight to the articles but I never logged in or even signed up.

Also-- right-click Copy isn't suppressed and there's no email list modal popping up when I scroll.

Did this site get hacked or something?

I really appreciate Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance concepts, that things we group together may not be in fact grouped by a shared trait, but instead my consist of a bunch of different sets of overlapping traits, such that no one trait is common to all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance

"If we think of the world's future, we always mean the place it will get to if it keeps going as we see it going now and it doesn't occur to us that it is not going in a straight line but in a curve & that its direction is constantly changing." (Wittgenstein, from Culture and Value)

So now we can expect Wittgenstein fan-fic?

I recommend this Side-by-Side-by-Side Edition of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: http://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/

An explanation of why some texts by W are still missing from the OP: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Projec...

TL;DR: substantial editorial input

I clicked because I read "all of Wolfenstein is now public domain". How embarrassing.

You also need to know Austrian to understand Frankenstein