![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Alice Ambrose (1906–2001) is best known as Wittgenstein’s student during the 1930s. Her association with probably the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century contributes to her obscurity. Ambrose is referred to in historiography of this period as ‘follower’ or ‘disciple’ but never considered in her own right as a philosopher. The neglect of her place in the history of philosophy needs to be resisted. This paper explores some of Ambrose’s most interesting ideas from the early 1950s, when she developed and expanded some of Wittgenstein’s inchoate suggestions and contributed to on-going debates about how to do philosophy and the role of language in the discipline. By combining an analysis of the 1950 paper “The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy” and the 1952 paper “Linguistic Approaches to Philosophical Problems”, it will be seen that Ambrose rejects the idea that ordinary language can be improved and begins to develop the view that philosophical language adapts to usage. Thus, Ambrose does not blindly follow Wittgenstein but breaks with his idea that there is something inherently wrong with the way philosophers communicate. The paper also seeks to show how marginalized philosophers become obscured in the history of the subject through the example of Ambrose.
Acknowledgements
I warmly thank Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Cristina Chimisso and two anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and suggestions on earlier drafts which helped to greatly improve this paper. Thanks are also due to Mrs Anne Thomson of Newnham College Archives for her invaluable assistance.
Notes
1 There is still work to be done on how far Ambrose and other students contributed towards Wittgenstein’s middle period philosophy. In the process that lead to the Brown Book, both Ambrose and Francis Skinner asked questions and made suggestions as well as taking down what Wittgenstein said. “Ambrose, far from merely performing a clerical task, took a much more active role” (De Pellegrin, “The Brown Book”, 10). If Wittgenstein had been able to come up with these ideas on his own, he would have simply written them down by himself, as he did with the Tractatus. Ambrose herself describes the end of this work as follows: “there was a break between Wittgenstein and me, and dictation of the Brown Book ceased. This was a grief to me … It was … a burden to feel responsible for the cessation of a piece of work. For it was evident throughout that year that a dependency existing involving Skinner and me … the magic circle was broken” (Ambrose, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Portrait”, 24).
2 This is implied by Hacker, “The Linguistic Turn”, which will be discussed in Section (3).
3 From Newnham College Archives, PP Lazerowitz.
4 De Pellegrin, “The Brown Book”, 3.
5 Records preserved in Newnham College Archives.
6 For correction of this story based on archival evidence see De Pellegrin, “The Brown Book” and Loner, “Life Unfettered”. Glock’s brief summary is more accurate: Wittgenstein ‘was paranoid’ and ‘tried to sabotage’ Ambrose’s publications (“Wittgenstein on American Philosophy”, 384).
7 Ambrose, “Finitism in Mathematics II”, 319 n.1.
8 There was no prospect of being employed in Cambridge; Susan Stebbing, one of the most accomplished analytic philosophers of the 1930s, was told not to bother applying for Moore’s chair in 1939 as her gender would make her appointment impossible (Chapman, Susan Stebbing, 126–7). The first woman to be hired to a permanent post in the Philosophy Faculty was G. E. M. Anscombe in 1970, followed by Jane Heal in 1986.
9 All her career details can be found in typewritten pages sent to Newnham College and are contained in the Newnham Archives as well as on the website for Smith College: https://sophia.smith.edu/blog/smithipedia/faculty-staff/lazerowitz-alice-ambrose/.
10 Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy, Beaney, “What is Analytic Philosophy”, Frost-Arnold “The Rise”.
11 This term is also much disputed; see Beaney, “Analysis”. For an interesting early account see Stebbing, “The Method”, who posits two levels of analysis, one metaphysical and another grammatical. See also Janssen-Lauret, “Susan Stebbing’s Metaphysics”.
12 LaVine, Gender, Race, xxvi. While such periodization is of course questionable, I opt to use it as a compass point to situate Ambrose. It is hoped that in future such timelines will be nuanced as less well-known names and ideas are uncovered.
13 Ambrose’s writings discussed here came before the 1953 publication of the Philosophical Investigations.
14 A good example of this is Soames, “Analytic Philosophy in America”. At one point after listing all the philosophers employed by Harvard University in the 1950s and 1960s, he declares these to be “as fine a collection of philosophers as could be found anywhere” (459). Of course they were all men.
15 See, for example, Siobhan Chapman’s excellent study of Susan Stebbing’s philosophical development and the ways in which it was curtailed by institutional factors.
16 Letter from Bertrand Russell to Ottoline Morrell, 25 October and 16 November 1912 (McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 89).
17 In her letters to Wittgenstein in 1934, Ambrose discusses what she will cook him (Ambrose to Wittgenstein 27.6.1934; in McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 230). One day, while she waits for Wittgenstein to be ready to discuss philosophy with her, she has to do needlework instead (Wittgenstein to Ambrose 17.1.1935; De Pellegrin, “The Brown Book”, 28). Like Stebbing (Chapman, Susan Stebbing, 34), Ambrose befriends Moore’s wife, Dorothy, with whom she has a voluminous correspondence.
18 On this phenomenon in contemporary philosophy see Antony “Different Voices”, 238–9.
19 Stebbing was “well-established in academic circles” (Chapman, Susan Stebbing, 2). Both Stebbing and Ambrose experience extreme difficulties with initially finding jobs (Chapman, Susan Stebbing, 37–9). A letter from a friend at the University of Wisconsin refers to Ambrose as ‘Alicelookingforajob’ and remarks “there isn’t a thing in sight just now” (Newnham College Archives, PP Lazerowitz, Witto to Ambrose 12 May 1933).
20 Beaney, “Chronology”, 99.
21 Flew, “Review of Max Black”, 286.
22 The page numbering is from Ambrose’s edition of her own writings, Essays in Analysis.
23 Church, “Carnap’s Introduction”, quoted by Ambrose, “Linguistic Inadequacy”, 166.
24 Russell, “Vagueness”. For the reference to Goodman’s use, see Rorty “Introduction”, 18–19. For a very good account of Wittgenstein’s use of pictures and models see Kenny, Philosophy in the Modern World, 133–4.
25 I do not have time to give a detailed account of Church’s work. See Anderson, “Alonzo Church’s Contributions”.
26 For example in Russell, “Vagueness”.
27 The idea that hermeneutical injustice requires finding the right terms to express experiences (Fricker, Epistemic Injustice) can be accommodated on Ambrose’s schema. Just as new words come into our languages in order to label psychological disorders we were collectively unaware of previously, so this can also happen with social disorders. For Ambrose, words that come into use due to a need are absent before that need is felt strongly enough; she does not have to deny that it is an unjust situation for the persons who suffer because of this.
28 Wittgenstein, Lectures 1932–5, Brown Book; Glock, “Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, 577.
29 Copilowish, “Borderline Cases”.
30 This pulls against Russell’s idea of his own ideal logical language: “I invented a special language with a view to avoiding vagueness” (Russell, “Vagueness”, 84).
31 Graff, “Shifting Sands”; Sorenson, “Vagueness”.
32 Glock, “Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, 576–7.
33 One way of measuring the ‘impact’ of a piece of work is to see how many times it is cited by others. One search engine, Google scholar, records only 12 citations in the last 70 years. See LaVine for a compelling case for considering ‘under-citation’ and ‘under-engagement’ with the work of women philosophers as sort of ‘gendered discursive injustice’ (Gender, Race, xxxi).
34 Kennick, “Art and the Ineffable”, 610.
35 Falzer and Davidson “Language, Logic and Recovery”, 133.
36 For the likelihood of this sort of thing triggering implicit bias see Saul, “Implicit Bias”.
37 This paper gets a more respectable 20 citations from the Google scholar survey.
38 This is then referred to as ‘proposal theory’ in Chisholm, “Comments”.
39 Chisholm’s critical paper begins thus: “Miss Ambrose discusses a number of ‘linguistic approaches’ to philosophical problems and seems inclined to accept what might be called the ‘proposal theory’ of philosophy” (“Comments”, 156).
40 Parker-Ryan lumps Ambrose in with Malcolm, Wisdom and Lazerowitz as someone who encourages us to consider ‘how we use language’ by citing this 1952 paper (“Reconsidering”, 147 n.13). See also Nielsen who discusses Ambrose only as part of a “branch of Wittgensteinians who follow common language philosophy” (“Meta-philosophy”, 2).
41 It is perhaps ironic that Lazerowitz invents a word to do this job, not fully agreeing, then, that ordinary language is good enough.
42 Michael Beaney points out that Wittgenstein actually introduces philosophical phrases and terminology, which is difficult to square with his attitudes. For an excellent attempt to explain his thinking on these matters, see Beaney “First Step”, 137–42.
43 Chisholm, “Comments”, 156; Harrah, “The Adequacy of Language”; Reese, “Morris Lazerowitz”; Nielsen, “Meta-philosophy Once Again”, 2; Glock “Wittgenstein on American Philosophy”, 383–4. For a similar tendency to look to Stebbing only for insights about Moore, see Janssen-Lauret, “Susan Stebbing’s Metaphysics”.
44 Ambrose becomes professor a long time before her husband and is included in important volumes such as the Linguistic Turn. It is quite conceivable that she felt pressure to promote her husband so as to avoid any domestic strife. It is still difficult for men even today to accept that their female partner has greater professional success than they do. See Byrne and Barling, “Does a Woman’s High-Status Career”.
45 Another example is the lack of engagement with Ambrose’s paper on Moore’s “Proof of an External World”, although it appears alongside Malcolm’s in the same 1942 volume (Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of G.E. Moore). Early on there is a marked lack of engagement with her paper, evident for example in Chisholm’s 1951 “Philosophers and Ordinary Language” which mentions Ambrose in one footnote; the bulk of his discussion focuses on Malcolm. In contemporary accounts of Moore’s paper, only Malcolm is discussed. See for example Coliva “Scepticism and Knowledge”.
46 See also Soames who defines analytic philosophy as “a discrete historical tradition stemming from Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein … ” and reinforces the genius paradigm by noting the reaction of Quine to Russell as his “most dazzling exposure to greatness” (Soames, “Analytic Philosophy in America”, 454). Ironically, Ambrose may have partly reinforcing the genius myth. In a 1968 essay she writes: “The revolutionary storm began in Vienna and moved to Cambridge University, where it had its culmination in the later teachings of Ludwig Wittgenstein” (Ambrose, “The Revolution in Philosophy”, 551). Ambrose’s edited volumes on Moore and Wittgenstein’s philosophy also contain ideas about their inspired greatness.
47 Interestingly, Wittgenstein denies this seminal view of himself, writing “I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed (Perhaps I have no seed of my own)” (CV 36).
48 So far as we know, Skinner made no such attempt. De Pellegrin, “The Brown Book”, 15–16, 20.
49 Letter to C. L. Stevenson c. 1934 (McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 219).
50 From a reference letter (https://www.raabcollection.com/ludwig-wittegenstein-autograph/ludwig-wittegenstein-signed-sold-wittgenstein-evaluates-potential).
51 Wittgenstein was notorious for his “general dislike of academic women and especially of female philosophers” (Monk, Duty of Genius, 498).
52 Letter to G. E. Moore, 15th May 1935 from Wittgenstein’s Gesamtbriefwechsel III. Wittgenstein evidently wrote to Ambrose herself to the same effect as she makes clear in a letter to Dorothy Moore: “He wrote me a letter indicating that I do not yet think lowly enough of myself” (8 Feb. 1936, Cambridge University Archives: Add 8330 8L/8/1).
53 Like LaVine (Gender, Race, 19), I believe that women’s words in philosophy are often not treated as if they were ‘expert assertions’. LaVine explains this in terms of Austin’s speech act theory, but this seems unnecessary given that it is just another way to seek the authority of a male philosopher to support a quite straightforward point.
54 McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 240, from AA 16.5.1935.
55 McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 240. Wittgenstein is not unaware that he treats Ambrose badly. In a later letter he writes “I hope you have forgiven me for inflicting pain on your while you were in Cambridge” (McGuinness, Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 261; AA 17.2.1937).
56 For a similar tendency in Stebbing, see Janssen-Lauret, “Susan Stebbing’s Metaphysics”.
57 Misak, “Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy”, 1009.
58 See Misak, “Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy”, 1112–14; White, Towards Reunion in Philosophy.
59 Ambrose's first published paper was a review article on the logician and pragmatist C.I. Lewis’ book, Mind and the World-Order. She provides a detailed critique and analysis but also proclaims: “this book is an event in contemporary philosophy. It is a real pleasure to chance upon a system so surprising in its reconciliation of waring camps” (366).
60 Bedmakers are domestic servants in Cambridge colleges, at this time normally from the working classes. The quotation is from the Yellow Book, quoted in Ambrose, “The Revolution in Philosophy”, 563. See discussion in Ambrose “Wittgenstein on Universals”, 106–7.
61 Ambrose, “Inadequacy”, 175. Analytic philosophy as it would take over in Anglo-America has an “emphasis on argumentation, clarity, rigour” and would be “relatively meritocratic and democratic” (Beaney, “What is Analytic Philosophy”, 24, 27).