Background
Wisdom, Arthur John Terrence was born in 1904 in London.
Wisdom, Arthur John Terrence was born in 1904 in London.
University of Cambridge.
1929-1934, Lecturer, University of St Andrews. 1934-1968, Fellow of Trinity College. Cambridge; 1968-1972, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon.
Strongly influenced by the early Wittgensteins 'picture theory of language'. Wisdom’s earliest work was an attempt to clarify the nature ol logical analysis. This had been a central preoccupation of the empiricist tradition since Jeremy Bentham. and. in the 1920s and 1930s, was a dominant concern of those who had been influenced by Russell. Moore and Wittgenstein. The idea was that some concepts are ‘logical constructions’ out of other, more fundamental ones. So, for instance, statements about nations should be analysable into statements about the individuals that compose them: and statements about material objects, it was hoped, would be analysable into statements about sense data. Wisdom held that analysis was the essence of philosophy, whose aim was therefore not to arrive at new facts but to furnish a better understanding of those that we already know. The obsession with logical analysis began to wane, partly owing to the difficulty of actually producing any satisfactory analyses, and in the mid- 1930s Wisdom came under the influence of the ‘later’ philosophy that Wittgenstein was beginning to develop in Cambridge. One of the first fruits of this influence was Wisdom’s 1936 article ‘Philosophical perplexity’. By now he had arrived at the view that philosophical theories are. in a certain way, verbal: they are disguised recommendations that we use language in certain ways. For example, the sort of scepticism that holds that we can never know for certain any proposition about material objects, when properly understood, can be seen simply to recommend that we should always preface any statement about material objects with ‘probably’. But philosophical theories arc not merely verbal: they may also express insight into the similarities and differences between the logics of various sorts of statement, similarities and differences which may be concealed by ordinary language. Scepticism draws our attention, for instance, to a likeness shared by all statements about material objects: though circumstances may, in particular cases, make it senseless to doubt their truth, nothing in the nature of the statements themselves guarantees their truth. It also draws our attention to the difference between statements about material objects and statements about our sensations: statements about our own sensations are simply not susceptible of error in the way in which statements about material objects are. Philosophical theories thus illuminate 'the ultimate structure of facts’ by illuminating the logical structures of different areas of our thought. Although the influence of Wittgenstein is clear here. Wisdom thought, rightly or wrongly, that Wittgenstein was prone to regard philosophical theories as merely the product of linguistic confusion. Wisdom held that they could also give expression to linguistic penetration. Wisdom’s most extended treatment of a particular philosophical topic was given to the problem of other minds, in a series of articles published in Mind from 1940 to 1943. Even here, however, the dominating concent is with the question how philosophers can come to say such things as that we can never know what another person thinks, and what insights such theories may embody, however confusedly. In his later writing Wisdom came more and more to emphasize the role of particular cases in reasoning. Decisions in such areas as aesthetics, morality and the law he thought cannot be determined by general principles; we must simply look in detail at the particular case, determine how similar it is to other cases and decide it accordingly. This procedure could not be determined by general principles for, first, we do not have any such principles and, second, if we did they would have in any case to be underwritten by their conformity to convincing particular cases. This, he held, was true of reasoning in general. This conception is present already in his highly influential article ‘Gods', published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in 1944. Though a dispute about the existence of God is not a dispute that can be settled by experimental means, nor by pure logic, it is, he argued, amenable to rational dispute, in much the same way that disputes about beauty, for instance, are amenable to rational dispute. Wisdom’s work was highly influential, especially in Cambridge, until the 1970s, when the more systematic approach to philosophy that was developing, particularly in Oxford, began to become dominant. Thereafter his writings were to a large extent ignored. This neglect may have been fostered in part by his prose style, which, apparently representing directly his slightly convoluted manner of speech, is, though often witty, not easy to read. J. O. Urmson called him ‘something of a landmark in the history of philosophy’.