Wittgenstein and his students, 1912-1968

Abstract

This thesis is the first study of twentieth-century Cambridge Moral Sciences students’ elaboration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to doing philosophy. It serves foremost as a contribution to the history of British culture and ideas. From the 1922 publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the 1968 founding of the Wittgenstein Manuscripts Archive at Cornell University, Cambridge graduates worked to elevate discussions of Wittgenstein’s talks on the “logic of our language” to new heights of public renown in Anglo-American philosophy. Employing unpublished texts alongside a general reading of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, this study ties the mid-century explosion of commentary on Wittgenstein’s “Linguistic School” to the instability of a peculiarly English concept of the don’s life. In specific, it assigns new agency to pupils’ participation in the ever-evolving Cambridge academic faculty of the Moral Sciences. By way of an elaboration of these post-graduates and undergraduates’ competing discussions of method in course lectures, published articles and club sessions, this thesis works to up-end much of historians of philosophy’s received folk wisdom concerning the rise and fall of the Cambridge School under Wittgenstein. In relaying students’ stories of compromise and concession in doing philosophy at mid-century, it also serves to get around terms of discipleship and professionalization in elite educational institutions in Britain, both before and after 1945, a topic which has gone largely underreported by intellectual historians. This study makes several contributions to the field of twentieth-century British intellectual and cultural history. With prewar Cambridge’s patrician environs as its departure point, the thesis explores how the “problems” of philosophy were first posed by a set of peculiar upper middle-class men who in thumbing their noses at Cambridge’s “immoralist” conception of homosociality reset public discussions of method to better suit their interests as logicians. In recovering this “tentative and incomplete” approach to doing philosophy, the study also works to unpack those now largely forgotten curricular alterations honours undergraduates and fellows made to university lecture lists and club by-laws amidst their engagement with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his subsequent writings. This goes a long way towards explaining not only Cambridge students’ readings of those unpublished manuscripts produced by Wittgenstein between 1932 and 1944, but also the prominent role post-graduates later played in wartime discussions on “devising” language-games. Additionally, the thesis clarifies the partnership the mid-century Cambridge Moral Sciences ultimately formed with the Oxford Faculty of Philosophy, showing that by 1953, the year of the posthumous publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, neither university’s membership could do without the other. However, as is discussed in the final chapter, an unintended consequence of this continued reception of Wittgensteinian philosophy via Cambridge was to discard the Moral Sciences as a coherent model of academic research.