European University Institute Library

Wittgenstein's secret diaries, semiotic writing in cryptography, Dinda L. Gorlée

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

Wittgenstein's secret diaries

bibliography

1080426100

Dinda L. Gorlée

semiotic writing in cryptography

"Ludwig Wittgenstein's works encompass a huge number of published philosophical manuscripts, notebooks, lectures, remarks, and responses, as well as his unpublished private diaries. The diaries were written mainly in coded script to interpolate his writings on the philosophy of language with autobiographic passages, but were previously unknown to the public and impossible to decode without learning the coding system. This book deciphers the cryptography of the diary entries to examine what Wittgenstein's personal idiom reveals about his public and private identities. Employing the semiotic doctrine of Charles S. Peirce, Dinda L. Gorlee argues that the style of writing reflects the variety of Wittgenstein's emotional moods, which were profoundly affected by his medical symptoms. Bringing Peirce's reasoning of abduction together with induction and deduction, the book investigates how the semiosis of the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretations of signs and objects reveal Wittgenstein's psychological states in the coded diaries."--cProvided by publisher

Introduction: silence and secrecy -- Symptoms -- Cryptography -- Cryptomnesia -- Fact or fiction -- Cryptosemiotician -- Tentative conclusion -- Appendix: list of coded passages from Wittgenstein's Nachlass