Wittgenstein : attention to particulars : essays in honour of Rush Rhees (1905-89)

a tribute. Rhees' father's achievements and family background are recorded in Rhees of Rochester by John Rothwell Slater.Rush Rhees left America to study philosophy at Edinburgh. He graduated with first class honours in 1928. Rhees taught at the University of Manchester and pursued research at the Universities of Innsbruck and Cambridge before coming in 1940 to the University College of Swansea, where he taught for twenty-six years. Influenced by great teachers-John Anderson at Edinburgh before he became Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Alfred Kastil at lnnsbruck, G. E. Moore and, above all, Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge -Rhees became a great teacher himself. His intellectual powers were impressively in evidence as he wrestled with philosophical issues in his lectures, always as if for the first time. Discussion was always central in philosophy for Rhees. He founded the Philosophical Society in its present form at Swansea in 1940, and it has met weekly ever since. His influence on staff and students has been and still is enormous.Very many people benefited in different ways from his generosity. It was fitting, therefore, that the Memorial Fund associated with the name of A. E. Heath, Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Swansea, contributed towards the publication of this book.As we know, Wittgenstein, the greatest philosopher of this century, published hardly anything in his lifetime. Rhees was his student and friend and was appointed one of his literary executors. Wittgenstein visited Swansea on more than one occasion for philosophical discussions with Rhees. He attended meetings of the Philosophical Society and became interested in the students and the Welsh-speaking communities from which many of them came. Rhees devoted himself to the immense task of editing Wittgenstein's work. His own collections of essays, however, Discussions of Wittgenstein and Without Answers, show him to be not only a distinguished exponent of Wittgenstein, but an original philosopher with acute insights into a wide range of philosophical issues. At his death, Rush Rhees was an Honorary Professor and Fellow at Swansea. He, more than anyone else, made Swansea a distinctive centre for the study of philosophy.Peter Winch and I are grateful to the contributors for their essays, and to Dan Rashid for help with the proofreading.1. In writing this section of the paper I was helped by discussion at one of Hilary Putnam's seminars at Harvard, and especially by some remarks made by Putnam and Stanley Cavell.'Axe Persons Bodies?', in his Problems of the Self (Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1973) pp. 64-81. Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introduction: Attention to Particulars....Pages 1-11 Rules: Looking in the Right Place....Pages 12-34 Language Game (2)....Pages 35-44 Lusus Naturae....Pages 45-60 Anderson on Generality....Pages 61-73 Commitment to Persons....Pages 74-91 ‘The Kind of Certainty is the Kind of Language Game’....Pages 92-111 Moral Judgement and Deception....Pages 112-123 The Personal in Ethics....Pages 124-150 ‘He’s to Blame!’....Pages 151-164 How Lucky Can You Get?....Pages 165-193 Learning to Theologise....Pages 194-200 Back Matter....Pages 201-205 The title of this collection alludes to Wittgenstein's idea that the problems with which philosophers wrestle are confusions which arise through an unwarranted extension of the use of words beyond their employment in ordinary discourse. Wittgenstein speaks of the 'contemptuous attitude to the particular case' as an evil due to the imitation by philosophers of the methods and patterns of a science which seeks generalizations and explanatory theories. According to Wittgenstein, philosophical puzzles are due to deep prejudices about language. In this collection of essays, in honour of Rush Rhees, philosophers investigate the hold such prejudices have on us in a number of closely related areas of philosophical enquiry.