WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig.

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Wittgenstein's Lectures. Cambridge, 1932-1935. First US editions of these lecture notes by some of Wittgenstein's most distinguished students. "It was through these pupils that Wittgenstein's new ideas were transmitted" (ODNB). They were published simultaneously in the UK by Basil Blackwell, Oxford."Wittgenstein's classes at Cambridge became legendary. They were typically held in his rooms in Whewell's Court, Trinity College, or in the rooms of a friend, and lasted for two hours. He spoke without notes, thinking on his feet with intense concentration. Questions were invited, and his classes often consisted of dialogue. His discourses, like his writings, were illustrated with a wealth of vivid imaginary examples, wonderful metaphors and similes. His themes throughout the 1930s ranged over philosophy and its nature, the philosophy of logic and language, the intentionality of thought and language, the critique of metaphysics, solipsism and idealism, the philosophy of mathematics, and, later in the decade, sense data and private experience, cause and effect, aesthetics, religious belief, and Freudian psychology" (ODNB).Alice Ambrose (1906-2001) worked chiefly on logic and mathematical philosophy and was one of the few students to whom Wittgenstein dictated his "Blue" and "Brown" books. The ideas traced in these formed the basis of his later philosophy as expressed in Philosophical Investigations (1953). Margaret MacDonald (1903-1956) worked in the fields of the philosophy of lang

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