Rush Rhees (1905-1989) was a philosopher, and a pupil and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein. While some of Rhees's own published papers became classics, most of his work remained unpublished during his lifetime. After his death, his papers were found to comprise sixteen thousand pages of manuscript on every aspect of philosophy, from philosophical logic to Simone Weil. This collection of unpublished papers, edited by D. Z. Phillips, includes Rhees's outstanding work on philosophy and religion. Written over an academic lifetime, (...) some of the papers are sympathetic to religion while others are not. It is Rhees's ability to interweave the personal and philosophical, and his integrity and intellectual honesty, which make this one of the most impressive books in twentieth-century philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Between 1937 and 1951 Wittgenstein had numerous philosophical conversations with his student and close friend, Rush Rhees. This article is composed of Rhees’s notes of twenty such conversations — namely, all those which have not yet been published — as well as some supplements from Rhees’s correspondence and miscellaneous notes. The principal value of the notes collected here is that they fill some interesting and important gaps in Wittgenstein ’s corpus. Thus, firstly, the notes 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: explanation, ethics, anarchism, contradiction, psychoanalysis, colour, religion, concepts, classification, seeing-as, evolution, the relation between science and philosophy, and free will, amongst others. Secondly, the notes contain references to, and brief remarks about, philosophers of whom Wittgenstein otherwise says very little, if anything — such as Brentano, Heidegger, Aquinas, and Marx, amongst others. And thirdly, the notes provide us with valuable examples of Wittgenstein ’s use of some key ‘Wittgensteinian’ terms of art which are surprisingly rare in his written works, such as ‘surface-’ and ‘depth-grammar’, and ‘centres of variation’. (shrink)

In these discussions, Rush Rhees, who was a student and close friend of Wittgenstein, works out what he has learned from Wittgenstein's personal teaching and from study of his published and (at the time) unpublished writings. Some are review articles of books on Wittgenstein, and these are devoted to exposition of Wittgenstein's views. Others are independent discussions of special points in Wittgenstein's philosophy. The longest article, here published for the first time, is an account or record of what Wittgenstein said (...) about continuity in private discussion in 1938. (shrink)

Selected writings, including those of Gʹyu-thog Yon-tan-mgon-po, 1126 to 1202, on the morality of Tibetan medicine.

Rhees draws on wittgenstein's writings and on several conversations with him to discuss wittgenstein's views on, Among other things, The separation of judgments of value from statements of fact, The nature of an ethical rule, The ways in which people work out their ethical problems, And the multifariousness of the phenomena we consider under the heading of ethics. (staff).

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Essays offer a glimpse of the Vienna-born philosopher's personality, character, and life's work.

In this book, Rhees brings out the continuity in Wittgenstein's thought, and the radical character of his conclusions.

Rush Rhees questions the viability of moral theories and the general claims they make in ethics. He shows how one can both be concerned with knowing what one ought to do while recognizing that one's answer is a personal one. These insights, arrived at in a distinctive style, characteristic of Rhees, are then applied to issues of life and death, human sexuality, and our relations to animals. To recognize why philosophy cannot answer such questions for us is an affirmation, not (...) a denial, of their importance. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a (propositionaI) modal-Iogic approximation to Quantum Mechanics from a reduced and characteristic number of “crucial experiments” and so independently of the lattice of subspaces of Hilbert space. Kripke’s semantics, which determinates this system, allows to define, from a new point of view, the notions of “measurement process” and “virtual world” and admits a natural interpretation which in turn can help us to understand the measurement problem. In this way, we can attempt a “many-worlds” interpretation of (...) Quantum Mechanics, in the way of Everett. (shrink)

Mechanism is a conception of the world according to which all can be explained by mechanics expressed by its fundamental concepts and principles. I’ll firstly show that, following Poincaré’s discussion on mechanical explanation, the very foundation of classical mechanics implicates that all just can’t be explained. Next, I’ll discuss the principles of mechanics as they are viewed by Poincaré, especially the principle of relativity that has a particularity in its form of “pseudo-universal”argument, as well as in its fundamental role for (...) experiences. It will be finally revealed that, the mechanism can be used as a convention, because, by the principle of relativity, we can have only local experiments but never on the universe, and consequently, non of our experiences would never lead us to any phenomenon irreducible to mechanics. Nevertheless, it doesn’t exclude the contrary possibility: experiences can reveal that it is not to commode as it used to be, without disapproving it. (shrink)

Filant la métaphore du « bestiaire », cet article retrace les différents gestes du processus créateur de l’historien. Bien sûr, il ne s’agit pas ici d’emprunter des concepts aux travaux sur le symbolisme animal dont j’avoue très volontiers que je ne les ai pas consultés . Les figures animales convoquées dans ce court article correspondent à l’image que j’en ai, de façon spontanée et non savante. Quatre animaux peuvent être cités : le lion, la fourmi, le renard et le castor. (...) À eux quatre, ils symbolisent les diverses attitudes que j’ai pu prendre au cours de la préparation et de la rédaction de ma biographie d’Offenbach. (shrink)

Four years after the publication of Wittgenstein's Investigations, Rush Rhees began writing critical reflections on the masterpiece he had helped to edit. In this edited collection of his previously unpublished writings, Rhees argues, contra Wittgenstein, that although language lacks the unity of a calculus it is not simply a family of language games. The unity of language is found in its dialogical character. It is in this context that we say something, and grow in understanding: notions not captured in Wittgenstein's (...) emphasis on language games, following rules, and using language. Rhees develops Wittgenstein's notion that to imagine a language is to image a form of life, without suggesting that we are all engaged in an all-inclusive conversation. The result is not only a major contribution to Wittgenstein scholarship, but an original discussion of central philosophical questions concerning the possibility of discourse. (shrink)

EDITOR'S NOTE The essay published here is edited from the Rush Rhees Nachlass, which is now in the possession of the University College of Swansea, under the direction of Professor D. Z. Phillips. The Nachlass is not at present open to students and scholars, apart from commissioned editing. The sources of the essay are three letters and three typescripts. The letters are from Rhees to M. O'C. Drury, who was a student of Wittgenstein's and a friend of Rhees's. They are (...) dated 21 March 1959, 21 July 1963, and 30 September 1964. (Readers familiar with Rhees's Without Answers will recognize certain expressions which occur in this essay. Chapter 17 of that book was draw from the 1963 letter to Drury.)One of the typescripts is dated 17 October 1965; the other two are undated, but I would guess they were written at about the same time. The title and footnotes are my own. T. T. (shrink)

In this article, I firstly show that, following Poincaré, it turns out that the very foundation of classical mechanics implicates that all just can’t be explained. Next, I discuss principles of mechanics as they are viewed by Poincaré. This will reveal the particularity of the principle of relativity in its form of “pseudo-universal” argument.

Una de las críticas más trilladas al giro decolonial consiste en afirmar que sostiene una visión esencialista y ahistórica de las identidades. Este ensayo pone a prueba estas acusaciones mediante una revisión de algunos textos fundamentales de la corriente decolonial. Por una parte, muestro que, si bien el giro decolonial retoma el tema tradicional de la identidad latinoamericana, tacharlo de esencialista resulta de una lectura simplificadora y homogeneizadora. Por otra parte, formulo la hipótesis de que el meollo del asunto radica (...) más bien en un “régimen de historicidad” (Hartog 2015) marcado por la primacía del pasado en los discursos sobre la identidad cultural. (shrink)

Definitions of privacy change, as do norms for protecting it. Why, then, are privacy scholars and activists currently worried about “normalization”? This essay explains what normalization means in the context of surveillance concerns and clarifies why normalization has significant governance consequences. We emphasize two things. First, the present is a transitional moment in history. AI-infused surveillance tools offer a window into the unprecedented dangers of automated real-time monitoring and analysis. Second, privacy scholars and activists can better integrate supporting evidence to (...) counter skepticism about their most disturbing and speculative claims about normalization. Empirical results in moral psychology support the assertion that widespread surveillance typically will lead people to become favorably disposed toward it. If this causal dynamic is pervasive, it can diminish autonomy and contribute to a slippery slope trajectory that diminishes privacy and civil liberties. (shrink)