Wisdom, Arthur John Terence Dibben (1904–93)

John Wisdom worked first at the University of St Andrews and then at Cambridge, where he later held the Professorship of Philosophy. At the beginning of his career he was an analytic philosopher much in the style of Russell, Moore and the early Wittgenstein. But when he moved to Cambridge the encounter with the Wittgenstein of the 1930s brought about deep changes in his approach to philosophical problems. Although greatly influenced by Wittgenstein he remained highly individual, indeed rejecting what was arguably the ‘later’ Wittgenstein’s most central claim, namely that metaphysical statements are the result of a misunderstanding of the workings of language.