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 While some of Rhees's own published papers became classics, most of his work remained unpublished during his lifetime.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 This collection of unpublished papers, edited by D. Z. Phillips, includes Rhees's outstanding work on philosophy and religion.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)

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.

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)

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

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)

A distinguished discussion of Weil's views on social philosophy, science, ethics, and religion.

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

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)

Combining the conceptual approach of racial formation and racial projects with the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Jeong-eun Rhee theorizes the “neoliberal racial project” (NRP) and examines contemporary meanings and operations of race and racism in relation to neoliberalism. She analyzes Amy Chua's popular parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, as a specific case of the NRP, and demonstrates how in this text race is pressed to work in new — neoliberal — ways, re/generating different kinds of categories (...) and meanings, yet also continuously drawing upon old categories and meanings, to effect and rationalize social arrangements of power and exploitation, violence and expropriation. What is noteworthy is the way in which racial neoliberalism builds silently on the structural conditions of racism while disabling the very categories of their recognizability. Consequently, Rhee argues for new, historically bounded theories that can articulate how the meanings, categories, and concepts of races are constantly being reconfigured. (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)

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)

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.

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

In 1933 Ludwig Wittgenstein revised a manuscript he had compiled from his 1930-1932 notebooks, but the work as a whole was not published until 1969, as _Philosophische Grammatik. _This first English translation clearly reveals the central place _Philosophical Grammar _occupies in Wittgenstein's thought and provides a link from his earlier philosophy to his later views.

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work... are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but from what I (...) have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "[Philosophical Remarks] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's The Analysis of Mind. He modifies the Tractatus's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."—Robert Hoffman, Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."—Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association. (shrink)

Since the start of the new millennium, many contemporary jurisdictions have been revisiting the fundamental principles of their civil procedures. Even the core areas of the civil process are not left untouched, including the way in which evidence is introduced, collected and presented in court. One generator of the reforms in the field of evidence-taking in recent decades has been slow and inefficient litigation. Both in Europe and globally, reaching a balance between the demands of factual accuracy and the need (...) to adjudicate disputes in a swift, cost-effective and efficient way is still one of the key challenges. The second reason that many countries are reforming their law of evidence is related to cultural and technological changes in modern societies. As the balance between, on the one side, traditional human rights such as the right to privacy and due process is shifting towards, on the other side, the modern need for security, efficiency and quick access to justice, the perception of what is admissible or not in the context of evidence-taking is changing as well."--Back cover. (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)

Critique of Norman Malcolm’s ‘Wittgenstein: The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour’. Rhees points out the danger of thinking of instinctive reactions as the foundations of language. The reactions are primitive, Rhees argues, in relation to primitive means of communication, ie, in relation to people who already speak a language. What we need to emphasise is the way in which primitive reactions are taken up in our ways of thinking and forms of life. That cannot be reduced to something ‘instinctive’.