Wittgenstein and his students, 1912-1968
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis is the first study of twentieth-century Cambridge Moral Sciences students’ elaboration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to doing philosophy. It serves foremost as a contribution to the history of British culture and ideas. From the 1922 publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the 1968 founding of the Wittgenstein Manuscripts Archive at Cornell University, Cambridge graduates worked to elevate discussions of Wittgenstein’s talks on the “logic of our language” to new heights of public renown in Anglo-American philosophy. Employing unpublished texts alongside a general reading of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, this study ties the mid-century explosion of commentary on Wittgenstein’s “Linguistic School” to the instability of a peculiarly English concept of the don’s life. In specific, it assigns new agency to pupils’ participation in the ever-evolving Cambridge academic faculty of the Moral Sciences. By way of an elaboration of these post-graduates and undergraduates’ competing discussions of method in course lectures, published articles and club sessions, this thesis works to up-end much of historians of philosophy’s received folk wisdom concerning the rise and fall of the Cambridge School under Wittgenstein. In relaying students’ stories of compromise and concession in doing philosophy at mid-century, it also serves to get around terms of discipleship and professionalization in elite educational institutions in Britain, both before and after 1945, a topic which has gone largely underreported by intellectual historians. This study makes several contributions to the field of twentieth-century British intellectual and cultural history. With prewar Cambridge’s patrician environs as its departure point, the thesis explores how the “problems” of philosophy were first posed by a set of peculiar upper middle-class men who in thumbing their noses at Cambridge’s “immoralist” conception of homosociality reset public discussions of method to better su…
abstract: This thesis is the first study of twentieth-century Cambridge Moral Sciences students’ elaboration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to doing philosophy. It serves foremost as a contribution to the history of British culture and ideas. From the 1922 publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the 1968 founding of the Wittgenstein Manuscripts Archive at Cornell University, Cambridge graduates worked to elevate discussions of Wittgenstein’s talks on the “logic of our language” to new heights of public renown in Anglo-American philosophy. Employing unpublished texts alongside a general reading of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, this study ties the mid-century explosion of commentary on Wittgenstein’s “Linguistic School” to the instability of a peculiarly English concept of the don’s life. In specific, it assigns new agency to pupils’ participation in the ever-evolving Cambridge academic faculty of the Moral Sciences. By way of an elaboration of these post-graduates and undergraduates’ competing discussions of method in course lectures, published articles and club sessions, this thesis works to up-end much of historians of philosophy’s received folk wisdom concerning the rise and fall of the Cambridge School under Wittgenstein. In relaying students’ stories of compromise and concession in doing philosophy at mid-century, it also serves to get around terms of discipleship and professionalization in elite educational institutions in Britain, both before and after 1945, a topic which has gone largely underreported by intellectual historians. This study makes several contributions to the field of twentieth-century British intellectual and cultural history. With prewar Cambridge’s patrician environs as its departure point, the thesis explores how the “problems” of philosophy were first posed by a set of peculiar upper middle-class men who in thumbing their noses at Cambridge’s “immoralist” conception of homosociality reset public discussions of method to better su…
author: Loner, John David
language: en
keywords: Ludwig Wittgenstein, intellectual history, history of philosophy
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5d8a06a4-0399-46b1-a571-8a7289004ca6/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-04-24
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:04Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.48314