Imagine that a couple of boxes full of hitherto unpublished manuscripts dictated to an amanuensis by one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers is handed to you. Imagine also that these materials include philosophical and mathematical ruminations which are nothing less than ground-breaking and you are supposed to edit them. That's scary, isn't it? You would need to navigate your way around this archive and trace any connections with the author's published works. You would need to decipher, transcribe and compile the materials, providing introductory chapters and notes. This was the project undertaken by Arthur Gibson and Niamh O'Mahony when they were entrusted with editing the manuscripts that Wittgenstein dictated to Francis Skinner. It was no easy task, but Gibson and O'Mahony have done a remarkable job and Dictating Philosophy will prove to be of tremendous importance to the field of Wittgenstein scholarship.

Critical editions are so rare nowadays that readers purely interested in Wittgenstein's thoughts may find themselves distracted as they skim through the pages of Dictating Philosophy. In addition to a Foreword by the late Brian McGuinness (pp. xi–xiii), a Preface by Gibson (pp. xv–xxii) and a 100-page introductory section by the two editors titled ‘The Emergence of the Archive’, the book features an abundance of illustrations – many of them in colour – and an impressive number of footnotes – 1769 to be precise. Beyond the core of Dictating Philosophy, ‘The Transcriptions of the Wittgenstein-Skinner Manuscripts’ that form Part II, the volume offers a further component, Part III, consisting of ‘Calculations in the Hand of Francis Skinner’, and a closing section of 18 Appendices, labelled from [A] to [R]. This editorial apparatus can be considered excessive; one may wonder whether an appendix that traces the genealogy of Skinner [G] or another that reproduces his death certificate [M] are strictly necessary. But it would be unfair to blame the editors for being a little generous with information; it is better to have too much than too little. As Gibson writes in his Preface, ‘[i]f you wish only to read the Wittgenstein-Skinner transcriptions from the Archive, go straight to Chap. 3, onwards’; or, as he suggests, ‘[i]f readers prefer only a brief outline before engaging with Chap. 3, read this Preface’ (p. xv). You certainly can skip ahead, but there is a lot to be learned about Wittgenstein and his place within the Cambridge intellectual elite in the 1930s and 1940s from the two chapters that constitute Part I: ‘Introduction’ (pp. 3–76) and ‘The Amanuensis Matters’ (pp. 77–99). Gibson and O'Mahony's comments on Russell (pp. 35–38), Hardy (pp. 50–52), Littlewood (pp. 52–55), Turing (pp. 55–59) and the latter's contribution to artificial intelligence (pp. 59–62) are particularly instructive and thought-provoking. The remainder of Part I provides a much broader and more accurate picture of the Wittgenstein-Skinner collection than when initially presented, a decade ago,Footnote ¹ offering fresh insights and valuable information to all who have an interest in Wittgenstein's working method or in the architectonic of his Nachlass.

However fascinating these historical and philological issues may be, for the typical Wittgenstein scholar the chief value of this volume lies in the transcriptions of Wittgenstein's dictations. These are divided into the six chapters that form Part II. Chapter 3 is a transcription of ‘The Pink Book’ (pp. 103–147), an almost legendary document among Wittgenstein scholars. It is contemporary with both ‘The Blue Book’ and ‘The Yellow Book’, which were composed in 1933–34. ‘The Pink Book’ opens with a reference to Schopenhauer, as in Alice Ambrose's fragmentary edition of ‘The Yellow Book’, and, as the editors subsequently recognise, ‘there are some parallels with Ambrose's […] Yellow Book’ (p. 108, fn. 31).Footnote ² The fact that Skinner's notebook contains revisions in Wittgenstein's hand gives ‘The Pink Book’ an authoritative status. Like other writings of Wittgenstein from this period, the topics covered by ‘The Pink Book’ include grammar, knowing, language games, rules, the meaning of a word, thinking and understanding. It will be interesting to compare ‘The Pink Book’ with the full version of ‘The Yellow Book’ when it becomes available. Appendix [E] offers a typescript, in which the final few lines are handwritten, entitled ‘Some Notes on “Personal Experience” taken from the “Yellow Book” (Companion to the Blue Book) of Undictated Notes Taken From Wittgenstein's Lectures 1933–34 by A. Ambrose and M. Masterman’ (pp. 382–95). This selection extensively discusses the use of the word ‘I’ and the problem of solipsism and idealism in connection with Descartes’ ‘ego’, whose name is explicitly mentioned as in Ambrose's partial edition of ‘The Yellow Book’.

The text edited in Chapter 4, ‘Communication of Personal Experience’ (pp. 149–85), is a sequel to the published version of ‘The Brown Book’, dictated in 1934–35. The archive includes a unique manuscript of the work, which is divided between six notebooks, occasionally amended by Wittgenstein himself, with the new section, which is published in this volume, being found in the final two. The remarks in the text are numbered consecutively from 1 to 36. The ‘printed version’, which was circulated amongst Wittgenstein's students and is referred to at the end of the Skinner version of ‘The Brown Book’ (see ‘Introduction’, pp. 66–67), comprises of two parts, the first featuring 73 numbered remarks (as in the first two notebooks) and the second 25 (this numbering appearing only in the published version).Footnote ³ As documented by the editors, there is some overlap between ‘Communication of Personal Experience’ and previously published material from Wittgenstein's own manuscripts.Footnote ⁴ But an allusion to the first notebook made in the final one (p. 176; see fn. 236 and 239) seems to confirm that these components form an extended version of ‘The Brown Book’, consisting of three sections. As labelled by Rhees, the writings from 1933–35 are ‘preliminary studies’ for Wittgenstein's major work, the Philosophical Investigations, and these new sources are essential to understanding the development of his thought. A key topic explored in ‘Communication of Personal Experience’ is the incoherence of a ‘private language game’ (pp. 175–80), with Wittgenstein mentioning Defoe's character Robinson Crusoe (p. 177), who is returned to in later passages of the Nachlass.

Chapter 5 is entitled ‘Philosophy’ (pp. 187–241) and comprises ‘Unedited Notes of Lectures’ given by Wittgenstein in January and February 1934. Like ‘The Pink Book’ published in this volume, the material is contemporary with ‘The Blue Book’ and ‘The Yellow Book’. The title of the chapter comes from the single word advertisement Wittgenstein would typically use for his lectures. Contrary to what Skinner's description suggests, there is some revision of the notes by Wittgenstein himself. ‘Unedited’ simply means that they were not reworked but convey an actual verbatim report of Wittgenstein's classes. There are dates for each lecture and the account provides a flavour of his unorthodox teaching style, a continuous exercise in paying close attention to the way we use language in the various contexts of our practices. As he put it in one of these lectures: ‘I want to give you a general survey of the grammar of thinking, intending, expecting, wishing, etc.’ (p. 194)

Chapter 6, ‘Visual Image in His Brain’ (pp. 243–54), and Chapter 7, ‘The Norwegian Notebook’ (pp. 255–68), contain transcriptions of short manuscripts. The former revolves around Hardy's statement ‘that he believed Goldbach's theorem was true’ (p. 243), the discussion taking place toward the end of 1933. It has a direct connection with ‘The Blue Book’, which already mentions this issue. ‘The Norwegian Notebook’, apparently bought in Norway in 1937, records a discussion on privacy and the existence of physical objects, including references to names such as Theodore Redpath and John Wisdom.

Chapter 8, ‘Self-Evidence and Logic’ (pp. 269–347), is the longest transcription. The manuscript presents lecture notes from Lent Term 1935 outlining sessions VII-XVI, which suggests that Skinner did not take notes from the entire series. They cover the same ground as Ambrose's edited lectures from that term, though Skinner's account, whilst limited to fewer sessions, is far more comprehensive and contains handwritten revisions by Wittgenstein. The course is highly technical, concentrating on issues belonging to philosophy of logic and mathematics which are addressed through constant dialogue with Frege and Russell.

Readers of Dictating Philosophy should not expect to encounter any hidden Wittgenstein. But the new angles of approach and skilfully crafted examples from these dictations unquestionably provide real food for thought.Footnote ⁵