John Wisdom

Wisdom was educated at Aldeburgh Lodge School, Suffolk, and Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class BA degree in Moral Sciences in 1924.^[2] He is not to be confused with the philosopher John Oulton Wisdom (1908–1993), his cousin, who shared his interest in psychoanalysis.^[3][4]

Wisdom was a lecturer at the University of St Andrews until 1934 when he returned to his alma mater, Cambridge.^[5] Here at the Trinity College he became a Professor of Philosophy. Near the end of his career he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. A Festschrift titled Wisdom: Twelve Essays (1974), edited by Renford Bambrough, was published near the time of his retirement from the same.^[6]

Between the years 1948 and 1950 he delivered the famous Gifford Lectures on religion at the University of Aberdeen. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1950 to 1951.^[7] He wrote the foreword to Morris Lazerowitz's The Structure of Metaphysics (1955).^[8]

He was cremated and his ashes were buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Before the posthumous publication of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in 1953, Wisdom's writing was one of the few published sources of information about Wittgenstein's later philosophy.^[9]

Of Wisdom's 1936 "Philosophical Perplexity."^[10] J.O. Urmson remarked that as the first article "which throughout embodied the new philosophical outlook, it is‘something of a landmark in the history of philosophy."^[11]

According to David Pole, "in some directions at least Wisdom carries Wittgenstein's work further than he himself did, and faces its consequences more explicitly."^[12]

Wisdom wrote a number of essays addressing the question of the nature of religious beliefs, statements, and questions. Appraising this work, D.Z. Phillips writes that; "no one among contemporary philosophers has done more than Wisdom to show us that religious beliefs are not experimental hypotheses about the world". Wisdom utilises his famous Parable of the Invisible Gardener to this end.^[13]

The first recorded use of the term "analytic philosophers" occurred in Wisdom's 1931 work, "Interpretation and Analysis in Relation to Bentham's Theory of Definition", which expounded on Bentham's concept of "paraphrasis": "that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity".^[14] At first Wisdom referred to "logic-analytic philosophers", then to "analytic philosophers". According to Michael Beaney, "the explicit articulation of the idea of paraphrasis in the work of both Wisdom in Cambridge and Ryle in Oxford represents a definite stage in the construction of analytic philosophy as a tradition".^[14]

If I were asked to answer, in one sentence, the question 'What was Wittgenstein's biggest contribution to philosophy', I should answer 'His asking of the question "Can one play chess without the Queen?"'.^[15]

For a more complete list of works see Wisdom: Twelve Essays (1974).^[16]