John Wisdom

Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge

(1) The Discovery of the Transcendental (2) The Mystery of the Transcendental

Never published, Wisdom’s papers are held at Trinity College Library, Cambridge. The archive is mostly fragments and incomplete manuscripts, and unfortunately, the Gifford Lectures are not present. Discussions of the lectures can be found in Renford Bambrough’s, Truth and God (1969), and Stephen E. Toumlin’s, The Uses of Argument (1958).

Biography

Arthur John Terrence Dibben Wisdom was born on 12 September 1904 in Leyton, England. A leading British philosopher, he advocated for the theory of philosophical analysis associated with Wittgenstein. After a position at the National Institute of Industrial Psychology in London, he became Lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics at St Andrews in 1929. Lecturer in Trinity College, Cambridge in 1934, he was eventually appointed Professor of Philosophy, where he remained until 1968. Moving to the University of Oregon as Professor of Philosophy, he retired in 1972 and returned to Cambridge as Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. 

The first to use the term ‘analytic philosopher’, and he was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1950 to 1951. Wisdom’s lively and rhetorical lectures entertained and deeply engaged, and his style was hardly academic. His lifelong passion was horses, and he took students to races and invited them to exercise his two hunters. Prominent works include Interpretation and Analysis (1931), Other Minds (1952), Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (1953), Paradox and Discovery (1965), and Proof and Explanation: the Virginia Lectures 1957 (1991).

Published/Archival Resources
These lectures have not been published and no archival information is available..