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:

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, strongly supported by D. Z. Phillips. But the only result was the inclusion of ‘A Lecture on Freedom of the Will’ in Philosophical Investigations in 1989, the year in which Rhees died.

In the length of time taken to prepare this edition for print, I have incurred so many debts that there is no simple way of identifying the individual contributions people made to the edition in its present form. I limit myself to simply naming those who helped in some way or other, knowing only too well that this list remains incomplete. In the name of both editors, I wish to thank Liam Cooper, Juliet Floyd, Peter Hacker, Britt Harrison, Lars Hertzberg, Wolfgang Kienzler, James C. Klagge, Brian McGuinness, Patricia McGuire, Felix Mühlhölzer, Michael Nedo, Alois Pichler, Josef Rothhaupt, Joachim Schulte, Paul Sensecall, Jonathan Smith, Ilse Somavilla, David G. Stern, and Susan Sterrett. We used Norman Malcolm’s notes of the Lectures on Similarity and the first lecture on Description by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library to update Smythies’ versions. We also wish to thank the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club for permission to publish Casimir Lewy’s minutes from a meeting held on 1 March 1940. The preparation of this volume would not have been possible without the generous support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The publication was facilitated by a grant from the Faculty of Humanities and Cultural Sciences of the University of Klagenfurt.

The contents of the present volume consist of notes taken by Yorick Smythies (1917–1980) when attending Wittgenstein’s lectures at the University of Cambridge from early 1938 to Lent Term 1941. Exceptions are Lecture 1 and part of Lecture 10 of the Lectures on Knowledge, which Smythies copied from notes made by James C. Taylor. Smythies also copied some of the lectures in Chapter 2 of this volume from Taylor’s notes. Moreover, only part of the material in Chapter 10 is likely to derive from lectures Wittgenstein gave in 1945, while the other part reflects Smythies’ own views. This item falls outside the period of ‘1938–1941’, mentioned in the title of this volume, but since the material of Chapter 10 cannot be described without qualification as ‘notes of lectures’, we did not include the year 1945 in the title. Only a small amount of this material has already been published, namely the Lectures on Freedom of the Will, the second half of Lecture 4 on Description, and what has been known as Lecture III of the Lectures on Religious Belief (cf. Introduction 3). They are presented here in their original contexts and with a revised dating.

Whewell’s Court Lectures – pronounced ‘Hyou‐el’ – is the title Smythies used to refer to the lecture notes of this volume. Whewell’s Court is the name of several buildings of Trinity College, in one of which the lectures took place. ¹ G. E. Moore gives a good description of the location of Wittgenstein’s rooms in that building: ‘Of the only two sets which are on the top floor of the gate‐way from Whewell’s Courts into Sidney Street, they were the set which looks westward over the larger Whewell’s Court, and, being so high up, they had a large view of sky and also of Cambridge roofs, including the pinnacles of King’s Chapel’ (MWL: 49). The room where Wittgenstein lectured is the one behind a tripartite set of neo‐Gothic windows on that side of the building.

Apart from the title of Chapter 2 and the descriptive titles of Chapters 9 and 10, which derive from titles Smythies used elsewhere, all titles were provided by Smythies himself. These titles – Lectures on Knowledge, Lectures on Similarity, Lectures on Belief, and so on – may suggest a more determinate topic than Wittgenstein actually intended to follow in each case. Even where the title more than likely goes back to Wittgenstein himself, as is the case with the Lectures on Belief, the topic mentioned in the title is only one of several discussed, and sometimes not even clearly the most salient one. ² As such, the lecture titles provide only limited guidance when it comes to determining Wittgenstein’s central concerns in a course of lectures.

Smythies gives only rough indications as to when the lectures were given. In his draft of an introduction, he says, ‘at various times between 1938–1947’ (cf. Preface). His aim was not to publish the lectures in the order they were given, but in a systematic order he had devised himself (cf. Introductions 3 and 6). His ‘Textual Notes’ are instructive in this respect:

The differing, consecutive series, which these notes contain, are not arranged in any chronological order of series. Others who attended these lectures, may be able to specify year, term, etc., at which such and such a series of lectures was delivered. But: – (a) I do not trust my own memory sufficiently to do this myself, (b) I think that an arrangement of the lectures in a logical, rather than a chronological, order, helps to make evident the continuities and divisions characteristic of Wittgenstein’s thinking. ³

The aim of the present edition is, on the contrary, to reverse the intentions of this plan and to reconstruct the original chronology of the individual lectures.

The final year, 1947, mentioned by Smythies may refer to a manuscript he called ‘Miscellaneous Remarks Relating to Volition by Wittgenstein in Various Other Lectures Which He Gave’. Smythies selected these remarks, which are not printed in this volume, drawing primarily on Peter Geach’s version of Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–1947 (GWL: 3–116), but also on the Lectures on Volition, Description, and Freedom of the Will. Smythies possessed a typescript version of Geach’s notes, some 30 pages of which were found among his papers. Why he did not take notes himself is an open question. By that time, he was certainly the most proficient note‐taker who could have been there, and the reports have it that he was indeed in Cambridge at the time (cf. PPO: 358). A comparison of the manuscript to a shorter typescript with the same title shows that Smythies ommitted the remarks he had taken from the Lectures on Volition, Description and Freewill. It is not clear, however, whether he would have stuck to his plan of including this selection as an addendum to Whewell’s Court Lectures, since the Miscellaneous Remarks appear in only one of his preliminary tables of contents along with ‘6 lectures’ on Volition, instead of eight.

Also the first year, 1938, mentioned in Smythies’ introduction needs some comment. Smythies actually began attending Wittgenstein’s lectures in the academic year 1935/36, when Wittgenstein gave his Lectures on ‘Personal Experience’ and Other Topics, as Margaret MacDonald called them. ⁴ Smythies’ not very extensive notes of these lectures are not printed here. As O. K. Bouwsma reports, Smythies made Wittgenstein’s acquaintance only years later: ‘I asked [Wittgenstein] about Miss Elizabeth Anscombe and Smythies. At some length again he told me about them. Smythies never saying a word – for three years until some Canadian‐Edinburgh student by the name of Taylor brought them together’ (Bouwsma 1986: 66). This probably happened in 1938, the only year James C. Taylor attended Wittgenstein’s university lectures. ⁵ Wittgenstein’s research fellowship expired at the end of Easter Term 1936, and he spent his time until January 1938 mostly in Norway and Vienna. He visited Cambridge in January and from early June to 9 August 1937 (Nedo 1993: 37). Wittgenstein’s Cambridge Pocket Diary from 1936–37 shows that he met a ‘Taylor’ on 18 June 1937, and Francis Skinner mentions James Taylor in three letters to Wittgenstein in autumn 1937. ⁶ It is also true that Wittgenstein sometimes gave ‘not open’ lectures: lectures that were not part of any university courses. It is, however, very unlikely that he gave such lectures in 1937, since he did not then have a position at Cambridge. The view to be favoured is that the earliest items in this volume date from the first half of 1938.

It may be useful to give an overview of Smythies’ presumed presence in Cambridge, at this point. Smythies was a student on the Moral Sciences Tripos from October 1935 to June 1939 at Kings College, part of the University of Cambridge. He stayed in Cambridge until June 1940 when he went back to his family home in Devon (cf. Introduction 4). He returned to Cambridge some time after 6 November 1940, for the rest of Michaelmas Term of that year (cf. Introduction 7). He also must have been present at a few lectures around 20 January 1941 (cf. Introduction 8), though this visit is unlikely to have lasted more than a short time. A long absence followed until early December 1944 when Smythies delivered a talk to the Moral Sciences Club (cf. Introduction 5). He then returned permanently to Cambridge the next year, in May 1945 or earlier, and stayed until after Wittgenstein resigned his professorship, in summer 1947, thereby putting an end to the lectures (cf. Introduction 9).

For the most part, Smythies uses the same kind of small spiral‐bound notebooks for both immediate lecture notes and rewritten versions of lectures. By ‘small’, we mean notebooks with 20 to 21 lines to write on. Most of them are ‘National Natty 300/2 Series’ notebooks of approximately 200 × 160 mm. He also uses a larger version of the same type of notebook, the 300/6 Series, which offers 27 writing lines and is approximately 255 × 200 mm. We refer to notebooks of this size as ‘middle‐sized’ and to notebooks with 30 or more writing lines as ‘large’. Other kinds of notebooks will be specified in the introductions to the relevant chapters.

One can see a rather soft pencil in action from Smythies’ first lecture notes in the academic year 1935/36 until Lent Term 1939, when he switches to a fountain pen in Lecture XII of the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. The soft pencil returns for the first notes of Lecture XXV and in Michaelmas Term 1939 for the Similarity Lectures. It returns one more time early in Lent Term 1940 for Description Lecture 1. In Lecture 2, Smythies switches to a pencil with a harder lead and finally to what seems to be a fountain pen with a fine nib, which he uses until the end of Easter Term 1940. This fountain pen must have been particularly appropriate for its purpose, since he writes faster than at any time before or after. This speed is also due to a system of abbreviations that Smythies has been developing since 1938. The same system is still in place when he returns in Michaelmas Term 1940, but the fountain pen with a broad nib that he uses now makes his writing slower. It is the same model that he employs for all rewritten versions. The broad nib and the absence of abbreviations are reliable features by which to distinguish a rewritten version from immediate lecture notes.

Smythies’ notes never give the year of a lecture, and only in very few cases do they come with a specific date. The dating of certain lectures printed here has been revised more than once, as can be gleaned from comparing the present dating with a preliminary dating in an earlier ‘Sketch of a Project’ (cf. Munz 2010). In most cases, comparison with the Nachlass was used only to confirm a dating that had been established independently. The most important clues were derived from the names of students that occur in the lectures, together with lecture summaries by other students, and Smythies’ reconstructed presence in Cambridge. As for lecture summaries, we wish to single out Rose Rand’s summaries, published in Mathias Iven’s (2004) Rand und Wittgenstein, as being particularly useful when it came to dating some of the most recalcitrant items.

An ‘academic year’ at Cambridge University runs from October of one year until June of the following year and is divided into Michaelmas Term, Lent Term, and Easter Term. We speak of the Regular Michaelmas Term, when we mean the period from 1 October to 19 December, and similarly for the other terms, which last from 5 January to 25 March, or 24 in a leap year, and 10 or 17 April to 18 or 25 June, respectively. In all other cases, we refer to the corresponding Full Terms. A Full Term corresponds to the lecturing period and is about two weeks shorter than a Regular Term. As will be seen, Wittgenstein did not always stick to the dates of a Full Term, even in cases where he was teaching a regular course, as opposed to his unofficial, ‘not open’, lectures.

We annotate the lectures with page references to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass as well as published writings. ‘MS’ and ‘TS’ are used for Smythies’ notes and typescripts of the lectures. We refer to the Nachlass by ‘vW’ plus an item number and page. Since the item number already encodes whether an item is a manuscript or a typescript (‘1–’ for manuscripts and ‘2–’ for typescripts), it is possible to use ‘MS’ or ‘TS’ for another purpose here. We have decided to adopt the abbreviation ‘vW’ for references to the Nachlass, in honour of Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003), who, among Wittgenstein’s literary executors, did most service to the Nachlass and also introduced the numbering.

With very few exceptions, no references to Wittgenstein’s own typescripts are given. We concentrate on original manuscript sources of the ideas expressed in the lectures and their dates. In cases where a manuscript has been edited and published, or where a virtually identical print version exists, we usually give reference to the published version only. ⁷ We also give references for the books and articles of authors Wittgenstein discusses. In some cases, it is likely that his knowledge of their views derives from discussions, rather than reading. In these cases, we nevertheless point out a printed passage in which the corresponding view is expressed.

Wherever possible, the text is taken from immediate lecture notes (‘N’). Additions in square brackets indicate significant additions in the rewritten version (‘MS’) or, if there is no rewritten version, in the next‐closest textual source, usually a typescript (‘TS’). Additions or modifications of our own appear in diamond brackets, ‘〈 〉’ (see section ‘List of Editorial Conventions’). Brackets may be dropped if there is a footnote that specifies what has been changed. Parentheses indicate parentheses in the original lecture notes, or the most authoritative source of the corresponding lectures, where there are no immediate lecture notes, regardless of whether square brackets or parentheses are used in the original. There are only very few textual variants in Smythies’ notes. These are printed in the main text within parentheses. Whenever possible, we have used square brackets in a way that allows for independent quotation of N and of MS.

There is no general answer to the question of how reliable Smythies was when he wrote up his immediate lecture notes. As for the status of MS, we believe that it was Smythies’ practice either to rewrite his notes anything up to several months after a lecture or not to rewrite them at all. Some additions he made to his immediate lecture notes may be based on notes of other students, such as Taylor’s in 1938. Accordingly, we believe that the MS‐based text is fairly accurate, as long as there is no evidence to the opposite.

We replace Smythies’ abbreviations (e.g. ‘B’ for ‘belief’, ‘T’ for ‘thing’, ‘des’ for ‘describe’, or ‘description’, etc.) by the corresponding words without further indication. He mostly uses the first‐person singular, but can move between first and third person. We replace ‘W.’ by ‘I’, making the necessary changes wherever this seems desirable, and add a footnote where the changes are non‐trivial. Obvious linguistic mistakes are corrected without further notification. This extends to most cases of missing words or abbreviations, such as, cf., a(n), the, or that. There is admittedly no clear line between linguistic corrections and interpolations. In some cases, adding an article, for example, implies a non‐trivial choice between a definite and an indefinite article, which may affect the sense of a whole sentence. Whenever we find this to be the case, we mark a one‐word addition of our own with diamond brackets. Incomplete or crossed out sentences are sometimes omitted without any notification, sometimes kept in a footnote, and sometimes restored in the main text. The choice depends on the estimated usefulness for the reader.

Wittgenstein used to have a blackboard at his lectures, which he also used for drawings (cf. MWL: 49, LSD: 293). The lectures in this volume feature more than 70 illustrations, for the most part redrawn from Smythies’ immediate lecture notes. In some cases, we decided to include vectorised versions of Smythies’ original drawings, mostly taken from a rewritten version, where redrawing them would have involved choosing between different ways of rendering the original. In other cases, illustrations have been newly drawn according to instructions given in Smythies’ text. This is never done without an indication in a footnote.

Our division of the book into ‘chapters’ groups those sets of notes that refer to one and the same lecture courses, or to groups of individual lectures that followed each other chronologically in close proximity. The introductions to the chapters adopt the following pattern: (1) a physical description of the source material, (2) the dating of the corresponding lectures, and (3) general remarks about textual parallels in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass.