Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Conversations with Rush Rhees (1939–50): From the Notes of Rush Rhees Ludwig Wittgenstein Rush Rhees Gabriel Citron (ed.) Yale University gabriel.citron@yale.edu Between 1937 and 1951 Wittgenstein had numerous philosophical conversations with his student and close friend, Rush Rhees. This article is composed of Rhees’s notes of twenty such conversations — namely, all those which have not yet been published — as well as some supplements from Rhees’s correspondence and mis- cellaneous notes. The principal value of the notes collected here is that they fill some interesting and important gaps in Wittgenstein’s corpus. Thus, firstly, the notes touch on a wide range of subjects, a number of which are only briefly addressed by Wittgenstein elsewhere, if at all. The subjects discussed include: ex- planation, ethics, anarchism, contradiction, psychoanalysis, colour, religion, con- cepts, classification, seeing-as, evolution, the relation between science and philosophy, and free will, amongst others. Secondly, the notes contain references to, and brief remarks about, philosophers of whom Wittgenstein otherwise says very little, if anything — such as Brentano, Heidegger, Aquinas, and Marx, amongst others. And thirdly, the notes provide us with valuable examples of Wittgenstein’s use of some key ‘Wittgensteinian’ terms of art which are surprisingly rare in his written works, such as ‘surface-’ and ‘depth-grammar’, and ‘centres of variation’. Wittgenstein and Rhees came to know one another when Rhees began to attend Wittgenstein’s lectures in Cambridge, in February 1936. 1 Wittgenstein came to think highly of Rhees both personally and philo- sophically. He wrote to Norman Malcolm that ‘Rhees … is an excellent man & has a real talent for philosophy, too’ (Wittgenstein 2011, 7 December 1943). Over the next few years in Cambridge, Wittgenstein and Rhees began to meet for philosophical conversations. The first of these conversations of which we know Rhees to have made 1 See Monk 1990, p. 357. Mind, Vol. 124 . 493 . January 2015 ß Swansea University and Citron 2015 doi:10.1093/mind/fzu200 by guest on July 2, 2015 http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from