Lecture on ethics

Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics is his sole sustained work on ethics. It is an unusually direct and personal statement to a non-academic philosophical audience-the only such lecture he gave. Moreover, the lecture was given in 1929 during the key transitional period when Wittgenstein was between the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his later work for the Philosophical Investigations. It therefore gives a fascinating insight into the intellectual journey that Wittgenstein undertook into a subject of profound personal importance for him.This edition is the most authoritative ever published. It contains the complete text of the lecture in three drafts. The text includes for the first time manuscript 139b which had been lost for 40 years and pages from the reverse of 139a which constitute an earlier outline of the lecture. Each draft is presented en regard with the draft and all emendations on one page and a final reading copy on the other. The complete text and a comprehensive notation