Background
Rhees, Rush was born on March 19, 1905 in Rochester, USA.
Rhees, Rush was born on March 19, 1905 in Rochester, USA.
Universities of Edinburgh, Göttingen, Innsbruck and Cambridge.
Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Manchester and University College of Swansea, 1940-1966. Honorary Professor of Philosophy and Fellow, University College of Swansea, 1966.
Having studied philosophy with John Anderson, Alfred Kastil and G. E. Moore, Rhees became a student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Rhees himself became renowned as a teacher during his long career at University College of Swansea, where his colleagues included Peter Winch and his students included D. Z. Phillips. As one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors Rhees was responsible for editing and bringing to publication some of the most important of Wittgenstein’s later writings. He was also a distinguished exponent of Wittgenstein’s ideas, and his papers were influential in shaping discussion of Wittgenstein’s work in the 1950s and 1960s. Rhees followed Wittgenstein in thinking that philosophical difficulties are rooted in confusions about language, confusions about what speaking is, about what being intelligible is. And, like Wittgenstein, he emphasized the importance of reflecting upon examples to appreciate the role that expressions of language play in people’s lives. Developing this theme led Rhees (in his paper ’Wittgenstein’s builders’ (1959), reprinted in Discussions of Wittgenstein, 1970) to criticize Wittgenstein’s suggestion that a few words given as commands on a building site could constitute a whole language. Rhees argued that, in isolation from the rest of the builders’ lives, the employment of such words would be like moves in a game rather than the speaking of language in which people have discussions, ask and answer questions, and so on. The nature of the internal relationship between 'the language a people speak and the life or culture they develop’ is explored with great sensitivity in Rhees’s remarks on religion, ethics and aesthetics collected in Without Answers (1969).