Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement

Table of Contents - Volume 28, Wittgenstein Centenary Essays - 1990  

Papers

Wittgenstein: Whose Philosopher?

G. E. M. Anscombe

One of the ways of dividing all philosophers into two kinds is by saying of each whether he is an ordinary man's philosopher or a philosophers' philosopher. Thus Plato is a philosophers' philosopher and Aristotle an ordinary man's philosopher. This does not depend on being easy to understand: a lot of Aristotle's Metaphysics is immensely difficult. Nor does being a philosophers' philosopher imply that an ordinary man cannot enjoy the writings, or many of them. Plato invented and exhausted a form: no one else has written such dialogues. So someone with no philosophical bent, or who has left his philosophical curiosity far behind may still enjoy reading some of them.

Professor G. E. M. Anscombe of the University of Cambridge was a pupil and executor of Wittgenstein's. As will be seen from the bibliography, she is a translator of much of Wittgenstein's published work. Her Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus was published in 1959 and her Collected Papers in 3 volumes were published in 1981. She was a contributor to volume 18 of this series.