Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics: originals collating, en face translation, and commented notes.

Abstract

This research project consists mainly in a pair of related items: the first is to provide the necessary means to deliver a bilingual and commented translation (German-Portuguese) of the Wittgensteinian text currently denominated "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics"; the second is to take seriously the author's literary style rendering the text through his own concept of "physiognomy". About the first aim, the purpose is to collect the set of manuscripts and typescrits composed on the subject between 1937 and 1944 for a work of comparison among primary and more elaborated versions, as well as later cuttings, handwritten notes on the typescripts, and lectures on the subject around the same time. About the second aim, that is to see in what sense Wittgenstein conceived his grammatical investigation on logic and mathematics as a morphology, i.e., not only taking mathematicians as inventors rather than discoverers, but as a philosophical activity guided by a double condition of authenticity and recognition. This sort of comprehension is necessary to understand the text not as a cognitive piece of discussion, which can lead to serious misunderstandings about the nature of his investigations, but as a work on oneself, or as an ethical/aesthetic philosophical performance whose objective is to leave mathematics as it is while it is liberated from a variety of philosophical confusions. (AU)