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 While some of Rhees's own published papers became classics, most of his work remained unpublished during his lifetime.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 This collection of unpublished papers, edited by D. Z. Phillips, includes Rhees's outstanding work on philosophy and religion.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

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works out what he has learned from Wittgenstein's personal teaching and from study of his published and (at the time) unpublished writings.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)

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)

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)

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).

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

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)

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.

What will be the posthuman society? As usual, there are two prospects: the pessimistic view and the optimistic view. According to pessimistic view, as technologies advance emerge new beings called as transhuman with enhanced intelligence and physical power, and extremely long lifespan and they will dominate humans. On the other hand, according to optimistic view, technology will benefit humans, so humans evolve via transhuman to posthuman with smart machines. There are complex issues tangled together in the dispute between the rival (...) views, especially such as the natural vs. artificial beings, human dignity and equality, and meaning of life. The aim of this article is to examine being and relation in posthuman age in the point of Nietzsche’s philosophy. I examine transhuman as a typical being of posthuman age and ressentiment as its relation respectively. Nietzsche has influenced the rise of transhumanism and posthumanism, as can be seen from direct or indirect confessions from pioneers of them, though there are debates about whether the influence is real or superficial. By paying particular attention to Nietzsche’s idea of Master and Slave, ressentiment, and Overman (Übermensch), I contend that (a) in the posthuman age new classes will emerge, which correspond to Master and Slave, (b) there will be a new ressentiment of Slaves toward their Masters, and (c) Overman as a creator of new value will be required in order to solve the problem by ressentiment. (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)

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’.

A fundamental notion of the Tractatus is that of the repetition of an operation. The operation specially mentioned is the simultaneous negation represented by the Sheffer stroke. ‘If an operation is applied repeatedly to its own results, I speak of successive applications of it. … In a similar sense I speak of successive applications of more than one operation to a number of propositions’.

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

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 can’t be explained. Next, I’lldiscuss the principles of mechanics as they are viewed by Poincaré, especially the principle of relativity. I’ll show that this principle has a particular feature by its form of “pseudo-universal” argument, as well as by (...) its fundamental role for experiences. It will be finally revealed that, mechanism can be used as a convention, because, by the principle of relativity, we can have only local experiments but these can never be extended to the universe as a whole, and consequently, none of our experiences would 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)

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

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)