Rush Rhees

Rush Rhees was born on 19 March 1905 in Rochester, New York.[1] He was the son of Harriet Chapin née Seelye (the daughter of Laurenus Clark Seelye) and her husband Benjamin Rush Rhees, a Baptist minister, author and president of the University of Rochester[2] and, via the latter, the great-great-grandson of the radical Welsh-born preacher and pamphleteer Morgan John Rhys.[3]

Rhees began studying philosophy at Rochester, aged 16, in 1922. As a sophomore, he was expelled from his ethics class by Professor George M. Forbes, who had "found his questionings rude and insolent."[2] This controversy, which occurred in February 1924 while Rhees' father was out of the country, was reported on the front page of The New York Times.[4] Rhees would withdraw from the university soon after.[5] Rhees matriculated at the University of Edinburgh later that same year, graduating with a first-class honours degree in philosophy in 1928.[6] Rhees then acted as an assistant to J. L. Stocks at the University of Manchester and then studied with Alfred Kastil at the University of Innsbruck for a year.[6] In 1932 he became a research fellow at the University of Cambridge.[6] While at Cambridge, he impressed G. E. Moore, who described him as his ablest student,[7] and met Wittgenstein, who became a close friend. Wittgenstein continued to visit him after his move to Swansea in Wales.

Archives at Swansea

Rhees taught philosophy at Swansea University from 1940 to 1966. He has been known mainly as a Wittgenstein exegete and for his influence on his friends, colleague Peter Winch and former student and his literary executor D. Z. Phillips. He was responsible for editing but also developing the legacy left by Wittgenstein, at times emphasising religious and ethical understandings of Wittgenstein's work, reflecting how Wittgenstein himself sometimes said he wanted to be understood. Together with G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe he was appointed by Wittgenstein as his literary executor. He was also Wittgenstein's personal executor.

Rhees was also influential in bringing the work of other philosophers to greater attention, notably for example the French philosopher, Simone Weil. For a time, he was visiting Professor at King's College London, and with Winch and Norman Malcolm formed a 'formidable triumvirate'[8] of Wittgensteinans.

Rhees returned to Swansea in 1982 after the death of his first wife Jean Henderson. In 1985 he would re-marry to artist and designer (Margaret) Peg Smythies, the widow of Wittgenstein disciple Yorick Smythies and the ex-wife of Barry Pink, a friend of Yorick's who had also been a friend to Wittgenstein during the last year of his life.[9][10]

At Swansea Rhees continued to teach, leading weekly post-graduate seminars from 1983 and, in the Cambridge tradition, welcoming a few students in 'at home' sessions for more detailed discussions of their research work. He also attended weekly meetings of the University's Philosophical Society that he had founded around 1940 (and which had counted Wittgenstein as chief amongst the eminent philosophers who addressed it in the years when Rhees was still a lecturer). It was also a forum in which students were expected to test and sharpen their philosophical wits. It was clear in these seminars that Rhees was not only devoted to exegesis of one of the finest thinkers of the twentieth century, but was, in fact, constantly absorbed in developing his own profound insights in Philosophy in repeated tours de force. He was self-effacing of his capacities and had to be persuaded to accept an honorary professorship at Swansea where he had previously turned down promotion during his teaching career.

Gravestone

In 1966 he took early retirement from the university to devote more time to editing Wittgenstein's works.[11]

Rhees died on 22 May 1989, and is buried at Oystermouth Cemetery in Mumbles near Swansea. His papers are held by Swansea University Archives.[6]

• Edited Studies in Logic and Probability (1952), a selection of works by George Boole
• Edited Philosophical Investigations (1953), by Wittgenstein
• Edited Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (1981)[12]
• Without Answers (1969)
• Rush Rhees On Religion and Philosophy (1997)
• Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse (1998)
• Moral Questions (1999)