Wittgenstein's Whewell's Court Lectures

Cambridge, 1938 - 1941, From the Notes by Yorick Smythies

Yorick Smythies, Volker Munz, Bernhard Ritter, Volker Munz, Bernhard Ritter

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781119166337
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119166382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

Wittgenstein's Whewell's Court Lectures contains previously unpublished notes from lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein between 1938 and 1941. The volume offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein's thought and includes some of the finest examples of Wittgenstein's lectures in regard to both content and reliability.

• Many notes in this text refer to lectures from which no other detailed notes survive, offering new contexts to Wittgenstein's examples and metaphors, and providing a more thorough and systematic treatment of many topics
• Each set of notes is accompanied by an editorial introduction, a physical description and dating of the notes, and a summary of their relation to Wittgenstein's Nachlass
• Offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein's ideas, in particular his ideas about certainty and concept-formation
• The lectures include more than 70 illustrations of blackboard drawings, which underline the importance of visual thought in Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy
• Challenges the dating of some already published lecture notes, including the Lectures on Freedom of the Will and the Lectures on Religious Belief

WHEWELL’S COURT LECTURES, CAMBRIDGE 1938–1941

Thinking is being alive. Living is exchanging thoughts.
Yorick Smythies

1

The notes Smythies made during the lectures of this chapter, the Lectures on Knowledge, are contained in two small spiral‐bound notebooks. The first notebook begins with Smythies’ version of ‘Are There an Infinite Number of Shades of Colour?’ (cf. Chapter 2), followed by this chapter’s Lectures 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10. Smythies inserted the lectures from the other notebook as Lectures 2, 7, and 11; Taylor’s notes as Lecture 1 and the first half of Lecture 10. The latter he went on to cross out, for unknown reasons. We use ‘N’ for these original notes and ‘MS’ for Smythies’ rewritten and expanded version of the original notes. The immediate notes are written with a rather soft pencil, typical of Smythies’ early lecture notes. The expanded version of Lectures 1 to 11 is written with a broad‐nibbed fountain pen into the same kind of middle‐sized notebook he used during the lectures. This was probably done in 1938, when Smythies had Taylor’s notes available. We do not know whether his insertion of Taylor’s notes and the other three lectures in their respective places was led by chronological considerations, but nor do we know enough to interfere with this arrangement. Lecture 10, as it appears in MS, may be a compilation. The section before the words ‘My Notes’ has no parallel in Rhees’s unpublished version of the lecture, while everything from ‘My Notes’ to the end of Lecture 10 does.¹

The Lectures on Knowledge differ from other notes by Smythies in that most of the meetings – six out of 11 – are dated. Unfortunately, no year is indicated, and half of the day numbers are difficult to read. Moreover, those that are relatively unambiguous do not correspond to the pattern that we were anticipating, being: 20 May (Friday), 27 May (Friday), 4 June (Saturday), 15 June (Wednesday). We expected lectures on Mondays and discussions on Fridays, as Wittgenstein had announced to Moore in a letter of April 1938: ‘I’ll have the first meeting on Monday (25th) at 5 p.m. … We shall meet in Taylor’s rooms in Trinity.’ On 26 April, Wittgenstein writes: ‘I find that I shall have to be in Paris on Thursday (day after tomorrow) so my Friday discussion is off … I shall lecture on Monday next’ (CL: 296 f.).

Since this is puzzling, it is mandatory to consider the available evidence for dating in detail. Smythies’ dates, including those with ambiguous day numbers, refer to Full Easter Term. Actually, the last two lectures appear to have taken place after the end of the official lecturing period on 10 June (cf. Cam. Univ. Cal. 1937–38: xviii). The immediate lecture notes of Lecture 11 are dated to 15 June. Lectures 5, 7, and 9 are known in a version by Rush Rhees, two of which are dated by Smythies to 20 May and 10 (?) June.² Rhees and Theodore Redpath think they remember that Wittgenstein taught a course in Lent Term, and Rhees dates the Lectures on Knowledge partly to Lent Term 1938 (cf. CE: 407, Redpath 1990: 46). This, however, is either false or needs qualification (cf. Introduction 2). According to manuscript volume 120, Wittgenstein was still in Vienna on 6 January. He travelled to Cambridge only after that. On 8 February, he notes his arrival in Dublin, where he spends five weeks in the middle of the term. His return to Cambridge on 18 March seems to be prompted exclusively by the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany (cf. vW 120: 57v, 128v). Thus, Wittgenstein could not have taught a regular course in Lent Term 1938, and since he was not well during the last couple of months of the same year, he did not lecture in Michaelmas Term 1938 either (cf. Klagge 2003: 349).

Our dating of the Knowledge Lectures to Easter Term 1938 is consistent with the cast of people who Smythies reports as intervening in discussion – Casimir Lewy, Theodore Redpath, Rush Rhees, Alister Watson, and John Wisdom – all of whom are likely to have been at Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1938 (cf. Klagge 2003: 348 f.). Taylor’s presence is evidenced by the fact that Smythies employed his notes for Lectures 1 and 10. The joint presence of Lewy and Taylor is particularly significant, since Lewy attended Wittgenstein’s lectures from 1938 until Easter Term 1945, and Taylor probably only in 1938 (cf. Redpath 1990: 46, Klagge 2003: 348).

Consistent with our dating, most Nachlass parallels are to be found in the Manuscript Volume 119 (24 September to 19 November 1937) and in Notebook 159 (spring to summer 1938), as Rhees already observed (cf. CE: 406–411, 418–426). Notebook 159 begins by alternating between the topics of the Lectures on Knowledge and the Lectures on Gödel (cf. Introduction 2). Since these remarks are partly in English, Wittgenstein may have used this notebook for his own preparation. Significant parallels are also to be found in Notebook 158, begun on 24 February 1938. It has a passage, partly written in English, that parallels the beginning of Lecture 2. The passage consists of a distinctive juxtaposition of remarks about philosophical puzzles in general and what he calls ‘the dream puzzle’: whether a dream occurs while we are asleep or is just remembered as occurring while we are asleep (cf. vW 158: 37r–41r).³ At one point in the notebook, he quotes an apparently typical phrase of one of his pupils: ‘Watson: “The key question is …”’ (vW 158: 39v). A few pages later, he draws the same figure of a cube that he uses in Knowledge Lecture 3 (cf. vW 158: 43v). The notebook says nothing about the philosophical meaning of the figure, while this comes out very clearly in the lecture.

Lectures on Knowledge
〈Easter Term 1938〉

Lecture 1

Taylor’s notes.

If someone says ‘I have pain’ and someone else says of him, ‘he has pain’, does ‘I have pain’ mean the same as ‘he has pain’? How can they mean the same, since the ways of verifying them are different? You could say: ‘Our scheme of paradigms is too simple.’

Is ‘It’s going to rain’ about the present or the future? You can say both (to a large extent what you say depends on your mood). Whether a proposition is ‘about’ something or not is generally a complicated matter. You’re putting (the question) into too straight a jacket.

There is a temptation to say that the two sentences refer to the same fact. The temptation is due to the use of a certain picture. You think of ‘the same fact’ as like ‘the same person’.

Is ‘He has pain’ about his behaviour?⁴ Cf. ‘I seem to have a rush’, ‘He seems to have a rush.’

For such phrases as ‘I’m in pain’, ‘I see red’, ‘I have such and such a wish’, I’ll use the word ‘utterance’. Like a moan, etc., as opposed to a description.

There is a complicated relation between ‘He’s in pain’ and the behaviour. They don’t mean the same. Though ‘He moans’ may mean (under special circumstances, e.g. when he is in bed dying, very, very ill) ‘He is in pain.’ (The two may come to exactly the same thing.)

The connection between ‘I’m in pain’ and ‘He’s in pain’ is that his sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Editorial Introduction
• List of Editorial Conventions
• Abbreviations
• WHEWELL’S COURT LECTURES, CAMBRIDGE 1938–1941
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement