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John Wisdom

Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom, usually cited as John Wisdom, was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary language philosopher, a philosopher of mind and a metaphysician. He was influenced by G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, and in turn explained and extended their work. He is not to be confused with the philosopher John Oulton Wisdom (1908–1993), his cousin, who shared his interest in psychoanalysis.

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John Wisdom
Wisdom by Judith Jarvis Thomsona
Born
Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom

(1904-09-12)12 September 1904
Leyton, Essex, England
Died9 December 1993(1993-12-09) (aged 89)
Cambridge, England
Education
Alma materFitzwilliam House, Cambridge
Philosophical work
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy
InstitutionsUniversity of St Andrews
University of Cambridge
University of Oregon
Notable students
Iris Murdoch
Notable ideas
Parable of the Invisible Gardener

Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom (12 September 1904 – 9 December 1993),3 usually cited as John Wisdom, was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary language philosopher, a philosopher of mind and a metaphysician. He was influenced by G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, and in turn explained and extended their work. He is not to be confused with the philosopher John Oulton Wisdom (1908–1993), his cousin, who shared his interest in psychoanalysis.45

Life

The son of an Anglican clergyman, Wisdom was educated at Monkton Combe School, Bath,Aldeburgh Lodge School, Suffolk, and Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class BA degree in Moral Sciences in 1924.6 He worked for five years at the National Institute of Industrial Psychology and was then a lecturer in the department of logic and metaphysics at the University of St Andrews from 1929 until 1934. Wisdom then returned to his alma mater, Cambridge University, as a Lecturer in Philosophy.7 There at Trinity College he was soon elected a fellow. 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 1951.8 At Cambridge he became Professor of Philosophy in 1952, succeeding G. H. von Wright, and retiring in 1968.

At the end of his career, from 1968 to 1972, he was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon.7 A Festschrift, Wisdom: Twelve Essays (1974) edited by Renford Bambrough, was published near the time of his retirement from there.9 Reviewing the same, Peter Winch writes of having "learned so much in the post-war years about what philosophy is and is capable of being from Wisdom's writings".2

Dying in 1993, he was cremated and his ashes were buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Philosophical work

Before the posthumous publication of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in 1953, Wisdom's writings were, writes Milkov, "read as indicators of the directions that Wittgenstein’s thought was taking following the latter’s return to philosophy in 1929".810 Indeed, 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."11 Milkov however contends that:

In contrast to Wittgenstein, Wisdom ... maintained that most significant philosophical problems originate not with language but, in the first instance, as a result of our encounter with problems of the real world. From this standpoint, Wisdom introduced into analytic philosophy the discourse on the meaning of life and on problems of philosophy of religion.8

Wisdom's 1936 essay "Philosophical Perplexity"12 was described by J. O. Urmson as the first article "which throughout embodied the new philosophical outlook, it is something of a landmark in the history of philosophy."13

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".14 Wisdom utilises his famous Parable of the Invisible Gardener to this end.15

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".16 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".16

Quotes

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?"'.17

Writings

For a more complete list of works see Wisdom: Twelve Essays (1974).18

Books

Papers

Notes

Notes

  1. "Thomson was especially impressed by John Wisdom, a follower of Wittgenstein and Thomson's Cambridge supervisor. His papers, she wrote, 'are often witty, and they are rich in clever examples'".1 She contributed the frontispiece and an essay to his 1975 Festschrift.2
References

References

  1. "Professor Emerita Judith Jarvis Thomson, highly influential philosopher, dies at 91". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 4 December 2020. Retrieved 20 April 2026.
  2. Winch 1975, p. 239.
  3. Ellis, Anthony (2006), "Wisdom, Arthur John Terence", in Grayling, A.C; Goulder, Naomi; Pyle, Andrew (eds.), The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, Continuum, doi:10.1093/acref/9780199754694.001.0001, ISBN 9780199754694, retrieved 4 February 2019
  4. Passmore, John (1917). A Hundred Years Of Philosophy. Gerald Duckworth and Co. pp. 437. It strikes one as odd that a philosopher should be called 'Wisdom'; that two bearers of the name should be contemporary philosophers passes beyond the limits of the reasonable; that they should both be interested in psycho-analysis has produced in many minds the justifiable conviction that the two are one. But it must be none the less insisted that J. O. Wisdom of the London School of Economics ..is not identical with his cousin Professor John Wisdom of the University of Cambridge.
  5. Jarvie, I. C. "Obituary: J. O. Wisdom". The Independent. J. O. WISDOM was an important contributor to philosophy and to psychoanalysis. To the confusion of some he shared both interests and his apposite surname with his cousin the Cambridge professor J. A. T. D. Wisdom.
  6. "WISDOM, Prof. Arthur John Terence Dibben". Who's Who & Who Was Who. Vol. 2019 (online ed.). A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  7. Ellis, Anthony (1996). "Wisdom, Arthur John Terence". In Stuart, Brown (ed.). Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. Routledge. pp. 844-845. ISBN 978-0-415-06043-1.
  8. Milkov, Nikolay (2019). "John Wisdom (1904-1993)". iep.utm.edu. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  9. Winch, Peter (1975). "Review of Wisdom: Twelve Essays". Philosophy. 50 (192): 239–244. ISSN 0031-8191.
  10. Holloway, John (1954). Wittgenstein, Ludwig; Anscombe, G. E. H. (eds.). "Can You Play Chess without the Queen?". The Hudson Review. 6 (4): 620–625. doi:10.2307/3847669. ISSN 0018-702X. JSTOR 3847669.
  11. Pole, David (1958). "Epilogue: John WIsdom". The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 103. ISBN 978-1-4725-1015-0. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  12. Wisdom, John (1936). "Philosophical Perplexity". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 37: 71–88. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/37.1.71. ISSN 0066-7374. JSTOR 4544284.
  13. Urmson, J. O. (1956). Philosophical analysis : its development between the two World Wars. Internet Archive. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 173.
  14. Phillips, D. Z. (Dewi Zephaniah) (1970). "Wisdom's Gods". Faith and philosophical enquiry. London, Routledge & K. Paul. p. 174. ISBN 978-0-7100-6847-7.
  15. Phillips, D.Z. (1969). "Wisdom's Gods". The Philosophical Quarterly. 19 (74).
  16. Beaney, Michael (2013). "The Historiography of Analytic Philosophy" (PDF). In Beaney, Michael (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford University Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-19-923884-2.
  17. John Wisdom, Paradox and Discovery, 1965, p. 88
  18. Renford, Bambrough, ed. (1974). "Chronological List of Published Writings of John Wisdom, 1928-1972". Wisdom: Twelve Essays. Totowa, N.J., Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 293–300 – via Internet Archive.
Further reading

Further reading

External links