Rush Rhees was born on 19 March 1905 in Rochester, New York. 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 and, via the latter, the great-great-grandson of the radical Welsh-born preacher and pamphleteer Morgan John Rhys. Rhys, who fled to America from Wales in 1794 to avoid prosecution, was befriended and helped by Benjamin Rush. Rhys's appreciation was such that he named his second son Benjamin Rush Rhees (the surname having changed after emigration).
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." 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. Rhees would withdraw from the university and leave for Scotland soon after.
Rhees matriculated at the University of Edinburgh later in 1924 where he was particularly influenced by John Anderson. Rhees was influenced by Anderson's left-wingsocial philosophy amongst other things, a sympathy he maintained for the rest of his life. He graduated with a first-class honours degree in philosophy there in 1928.
That same year he was appointed assistant lecturer, under J. L. Stocks, at the University of Manchester. This was a position he held for four years.
In 1933, Rhees became a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge with G. E. Moore as his supervisor. Rhees impressed Moore, who once described him as his ablest student, although Rhees ultimately proved unable to submit a dissertation. Rhees had, at first, been put off attending Wittgenstein’s lectures by the behaviour of his acolytes, with Moore's encouragement, he began to do so from 1933, and continued to do so during subsequent terms until the summer of 1936.
Rhees returned to Manchester as a temporary Assistant Lecturer in 1937 then left academia to work as a welder in a factory until 1940. In the 1940s Rhees considered joining the TrotskyistRevolutionary Communist Party. Previously he had been sympathetic to anarchism, publishing articles in the anarchist newspaper Freedom ( which had been founded by Peter Kropotkin ).
H. O. Mounce, a one-time student and later colleague, records that until middle age Rhees was "a militant atheist" holding "in the manner of Nietzsche, that religion was both false and servile" but, by the 1950s, his attitude entirely changed though it is unclear why this change came about. Though never a member of any church, Rhees became interested in, and sympathetic towards, Catholicism. Fergus Kerr identifies remarks in Rhees' nachlass that suggest "fairly sustained Mass-going over a period" and an expressed preference for the Latin mass over 'the vernacular'.
Career
With the departure of two of his colleagues for war service, A. E. Heath directly recruited Rhees to work alongside him from 1940 at the then University College of Swansea. Initially this was as a temporary assistant lecturer but Heath managed to secure him a permanent position.:224–225 Rhees taught philosophy at the Swansea until 1966, when he took early retirement from the university to devote more time to editing Wittgenstein's works. He has been known mainly as a Wittgenstein exegete and for his influence on his philosophical colleagues at Swansea such as Peter Winch and R. F. Holland, and D. Z. Phillips (a one-time student of Rhees and later his literary executor). Although he would not accept advancement to a senior lectureship, Rhees is credited by Hsu with exercising "extraordinary influence on the shape of the philosophy department and on the kind of philosophy done there" and, indeed, for bringing Winch, Holland and J. R. Jones into the department.
Rhees developed the legacy left by Wittgenstein, at times emphasising religious and ethical understandings of Wittgenstein's work. He was Wittgenstein's personal executor and, together with G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, he was also his literary executor. In this latter role he was responsible for (co-)editing Wittgestein's Nachlass. Rhees' work in this role was not without controversy. His editorial work on the Philosophische Grammatik(1970) – translated by Anthony Kenny as Philosophical Grammar (1974) – was the subject of particular criticism.
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 (a fellow student from his Cambridge years), formed a 'formidable triumvirate' 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.
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. 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.
A volume of essays in Rhees' honour was published that same year. This collection was edited by D.Z. Phillips and Peter Winch, containing essays by Cora Diamond, Norman Malcolm, David Cockburn, H. O. Mounce, Raimond Gaita and others. Numerous posthumous collections of Rhees' published works, notes and manuscripts appeared under the editorship of D.Z. Phillips in the years that followed.
Rhees' papers are held by Swansea University Archives.
with G.E.M. Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations, (1953), G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.)
with G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, (1956), G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford, revised edition 1978.
The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations, (1958) with an introduction by Rhees.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (1981) by Norman Malcolm with a postscript by Rhees
*For a more complete list of major works published during his lifetime see "Rush Rhees: Main Publications" in Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars (1989)
Notes
↑Contrary to Monk (1990) p.357, Rhees arrived in Cambridge before 1935, and contrary to Von Der Ruhr (2009) p.224, Rhees did not only begin to attend Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1936.
↑"In 1940 Rhees answered an emergency call from Swansea. Professor A.E. Heath's colleagues W. B. GALLIE and Karl BRITTON had departed on war service."
↑Phillips, D.Z. (1989-06-18). "Introduction: Attention to Particulars". Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars Essays in honour of Rush Rhees (1905–89). (ed.) Phillips, D. Z., Winch, Peter. London. pp.10–11. ISBN9781349111978. OCLC1086447594. Rush Rhees had a distinguished ancestry. His great-great-grand-father, Morgan John Rhys, Baptist preacher and radical pamphleteer, fled from Wales to America in 1794 during the unrest which followed the French Revolution. Benjamin Rush, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, helped him to form a Welsh colony in the Alleghenies. Morgan John Rhees (the spelling of the surname had changed) named his second son Benjamin Rush Rhees. Rhees' father was also named Benjamin Rush Rhees, but dropped the 'Benjamin'. He was an outstanding president of Rochester University, to whom the Rush Rhees Library stands as a tribute. Rhees' father's achievements and family background are recorded in 'Rhees of Rochester' by John Rothwell Slater.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑"Radicalism of Rochester President's Son Causes Professor to Bar Youth From Class". The New York Times. 1924-02-28. ISSN0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-05-22. The 'advanced ideas' of Rush Rhees Jr., son of the President of the University of Rochester., have caused him to be barred from the second semester of his ethics class at the university. His ideas are said to have conflicted with those of Dr. G. M. Forbes, head of the philosophy department. ... 'The most unsatisfactory notebook for the year's work I have ever had turned in to me,' Dr. Forbes told his class of seventy-five students referring to young Rhees's work. 'It attempted refutation of everything I had taught during the year.' Young Rhees said ...'I am a radical. Dr. Forbes is not. That is why I am barred from the course,' the student said. … 'Seemingly he does not want any one to formulate ideas which do not accord with his own.'
↑"When Rush Rhees' son dropped out". Campus Times. 2016-03-24. Retrieved 2019-05-22. The elder Rhees' biographer is wholly silent on the President's reaction to the nationally publicized controversy stirred up by his son back in Rochester.... Rhees, Jr. withdrew from the University shortly after this incident, and he left for Scotland prior to his father's return home. Rhees, Jr. completed his undergraduate education at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland....
↑Brown, Stuart C.; Bredin, Hugh, eds. (2005). The dictionary of twentieth-century British philosophers. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Continuum. ISBN978-1-84371-096-7.
↑Rhees, Rush. (2004). "Acknowledgments". In Dialogue with the Greeks: Volume I: The Presocratics and Reality. Phillips, D. Z. (Dewi Zephaniah). Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate. ISBN0754639886. OCLC53469916.
↑Baker, G. P.; Hacker, P. M. S. (1976). "Critical Notice". Mind. 85 (338): 269–294. ISSN0026-4423. Rhees has successfully extracted a book from ... often inchoate material. Nevertheless the editing suffers from grave defects which cannot be passed over.
Wallgren, Thomas H., ed. (2024). The Creation of Wittgenstein: Understanding the Roles of Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright. Bloomsbury Publishing.
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