Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Conversations with Rush Rhees (1939-50): from the notes of Rush Rhees

Abstract

Between 1937 and 1951 Wittgenstein had numerous philosophical conversationswith his student and close friend, Rush Rhees. This article is composed of Rhees’snotes of twenty such conversations—namely, all those which have not yet beenpublished—as well as some supplements from Rhees’s correspondence and mis-cellaneous notes. The principal value of the notes collected here is that they fillsome interesting and important gaps in Wittgenstein’s corpus. Thus, firstly, thenotes touch on a wide range of subjects, a number of which are only briefly addressed by Wittgenstein elsewhere, if at all. The subjects discussed include: ex-planation, ethics, anarchism, contradiction, psychoanalysis, colour, religion, con-cepts, classification, seeing-as, evolution, the relation between science andphilosophy, and free will, amongst others. Secondly, the notes contain referencesto, and brief remarks about, philosophers of whom Wittgenstein otherwise saysvery little, if anything—such as Brentano, Heidegger, Aquinas, and Marx, amongstothers. And thirdly, the notes provide us with valuable examples of Wittgenstein’suse of some key ‘Wittgensteinian’ terms of art which are surprisingly rare in hiswritten works, such as ‘surface-’ and ‘depth-grammar’, and ‘centres of variation’.