Preface

I first met Rush Rhees when I came to Swansea as an exchange student in autumn, 1988. He allowed me join his PhD seminar, and from then on we saw each other regularly. That winter, Rhees spent some time in hospital, and I visited him almost every day to talk about Wittgenstein's philosophy. The first day he was allowed out of bed, I saw him sitting in an armchair with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Grammar on his lap. This made a great impression on me. After his discharge from hospital, Rhees and I continued our meetings at his home, where I first came into contact with his wife, Peg Smythies Rhees. She had been Yorick Smythies' wife before marrying Rhees, after Smythies' death, in 1980. From then on, I kept in close contact with Peg over the years until her own death in 2014.

Some time in the mid-1990s, she gave me around 30 typescripts of lecture notes Smythies took during lectures held by Wittgenstein mostly between 1938 and 1941, all in all about 700 pages. Additionally, Peg signed over to me the rights to work on and publish these notes. In 1998, she engaged Bernard Quaritch, a London antiquarian, to sell Smythies' original notes of Wittgenstein's lectures, in sum about 2000 notebook pages, plus 23 tapes of recordings of the same material dictated by Smythies, based on those notes. Quaritch then got in contact with me and asked if I could make an inventory of the material. With respect to the notes, this was only possible because I already possessed the corresponding typescripts; the notes just by themselves were hardly legible. And since I owned the copyright, Quaritch allowed me to make photocopies of all the relevant notes and copy the tapes. All the other Smythies' notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts not directly related to Wittgenstein's lectures, Quaritch sent to my private address in Austria.

In 2001, the original lecture notes were sold to Kagoshima International University, Japan, where they have been kept under wraps since then. A microfilm of the whole handwritten material is held by Trinity College Cambridge and myself. The microfilm had been made for legal reasons before the material was sold to Japan.

Through Peg Smythies Rhees, I also came into possession of a few items that shed light on Smythies' personality, some of which are written by Wittgenstein. Since they have not appeared in print, I would like to include them here. When Smythies applied for a position as a librarian at Barnett House, in 1950, he collected various testimonials by Georg Henrik von Wright, G. E. Moore, Wittgenstein, and others. Wittgenstein wrote:

Mr. Yorick Smythies attended my classes on philosophy for over three years during the time when I was first lecturer and later Professor of Philosophy in Cambridge. I came into personal contact with him about eleven years ago and soon became greatly impressed by his mind and his personality. He is a man of very great intelligence, scrupulous honesty and conscientiousness, and of a kindly and obliging nature. He has a vivacious mind and is widely read. I have, in the last ten years, had innumerable discussions with him on a wide range of subjects and have always found his remarks most stimulating.1

Already 10 years earlier in 1940, Wittgenstein had written his first reference for Smythies:

Mr. Yorick Smythies has attended my classes for four years; I have also had a great many discussions and conversations with him outside these classes. He has always impressed me by his uncommon intelligence as well as by his seriousness and sincerity. He is a kindhearted, gentle, and even-tempered man.2

Although Smythies had already joined Wittgenstein's Lectures on 'Personal Experience' in the academic year 1935/36, he only made his acquaintance in 1938 through James C. Taylor, another student. The most probable reasons for this delay are, on the one hand, Wittgenstein's absence from Cambridge after Easter Term 1936, when his Research Fellowship expired, and Smythies' young age, on the other. When Smythies began the Moral Science Tripos in 1935/36, he was only 18. In a draft of a letter to his mother, from 1938, he writes:

Dear Mama,

I have been having lectures from Wittgenstein nearly every day. He has been very good. Yesterday he lectured from 2?p.m.-7. Taylor asked him if he would meet me at lunch; he said he would come to lunch, but wouldn't meet me. I don't think he likes the look of me very much.3

In the last decade of his life, Smythies prepared his own notes for publication and made various attempts to get them published. He also wrote an introduction to the notes in which he defends an austere editorial approach:

Wittgenstein said to me, on several occasions, that he would like me to publish, one day, my notes of his lectures. The lectures from which these notes were taken were delivered, at Whewell's Court, Trinity College, at various times between 1938-1947.

Re-reading them, now, after thirty years, I find them more natural, fluent, simple, continuous, expressive, than the remarks contained in Wittgenstein's so far published writings. I think that there are other people, especially amongst those unlinked with professional philosophy, who will, like myself, obtain more pleasure from these notes, than from those more compressed, more deeply worked upon, more tacit, remarks, written and selected by Wittgenstein himself, for possible publication. While he was lecturing, he was not able to delete what had been said, or to give to trains of thought more tightness than they were showing themselves to have. Also, tones which give personal expressiveness to his lectures became omitted from his writings. The expletives, interjectory phrases, slangy asides, etc., which were essentially constituent in what he was saying to his classes, would have shown affectation if they had been addressed to the general, reading, public.

These notes were taken down at my maximum speed of writing, making the words Wittgenstein was uttering and the notes being taken down, nearly simultaneous with one another. It results from this that the notes contain numerous grammatical errors, German constructions, uncompleted beginnings of sentences, etc. In nearly all, but not in all instances, such errors and inconsistencies have been left uncorrected. Editorial corrections would have resulted in blotting the impression that, in these lectures, Wittgenstein was not engaged in developing trains of thought (previously worked out, less completely, by himself), but was engaged in thinking out, spontaneously and impromptu, the utterances he was producing.4

The two main reasons Smythies failed to get the notes published were this editorial approach and the way he went about preparing the text for publication. Smythies returned to the notes in the early 1970s. He made tape recordings of nearly all the notes he had made of Wittgenstein's lectures during his time in Cambridge. This was only possible because he had provided a clean handwritten version of most of the notes he had taken. As already mentioned, those first notes were themselves barely legible, particularly because Smythies had developed his own kind of stenographic system.

I assume it was those rewritten notes that he showed to Wittgenstein, and to which the latter referred, when he said that he would like to have them published. The tapes were the basis for a typescript version made by a secretary from Blackwell Publishers. Jim Feather, Blackwell's General Manager at the time, was particularly enthusiastic about the project, and offered to help produce a printable version. Feather left for the United States in the mid-1970s, and it seems that the whole project was pursued with less eagerness. Furthermore, the secretary clearly had little understanding of the nature of the material. This led to innumerable gaps, spelling mistakes, nonsensical expressions, etc. She also misspelled most of the names, including Wittgenstein's own. So, without the original notes and rewritten versions, much of the typed material was quite useless, not unlike the way the original notes might be difficult to decipher and order correctly, without being able to consult the rewritten and typed lectures.

In his correspondence with Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe, and the publisher, it becomes obvious that Smythies rejected almost all editorial intervention. This attitude was strongly supported by Anscombe. I suspect this had to do with the fact that not all mistakes or awkward expressions were due to Smythies and his note taking, or the typing process, but also some were from Wittgenstein himself, as implied in the last paragraph of Smythies' introduction. The publisher, however, explicitly insisted on a range of editorial interventions.

So, the only notes that were eventually published, by Blackwell, although not with Smythies as editor, were those included in the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (1966) and the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (1976, edited by Cora Diamond). At some point in the mid-1970s, C. Grant Luckhardt intended to publish the Lectures on Freedom of the Will (included here in Chapter 10) as well as two of the Lectures on Volition in his book Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives. We know this from Smythies' correspondence, though neither item was eventually included in this 1979 publication. After Smythies' death, Rhees made another attempt to publish at least part of the notes,...