by Ethan Kovnat
It was summer of 1949, and the Cornell University Philosophy Club was gathered in a small room in Goldwin Smith Hall. This group, an assorted collection of professors and graduate students, had gathered to discuss a paper by the eminent faculty-member Professor Gregory Vlastos on Kant’s ethics.¹ Among them, one man stood out. He was an older man, very thin and shabbily dressed. One graduate student who was present later described this man as looking like “some sort of atheistical, vegetarian nut” (Gass 1970, 247-249; quoted in Pinch & Swedberg 2012, 9). Another apparently mistook him for a janitor who had wandered in by mistake (Kennick n.d; quoted in Pinch & Swedberg 2012, 11). As the professors and students heartedly and enthusiastically discussed Vlastos’s paper, the older man stayed silent. Until, finally, during a lull in discussion, Professor Max Black turned to the older man and said, “Would you care to comment, Dr. Wittgenstein?”²
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an Austrian-born British philosopher who is now considered to be one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century (and, perhaps, of all time). Wittgenstein is cited as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, the dominant style of philosophy in the Anglophone world, and his books Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are nearly universally-read philosophical classics. And for about ten weeks in 1949, he was a Cornellian. Wittgenstein’s time from July through October staying in Ithaca with Cornell professor Norman Malcom has become the stuff of legend. This was Wittgenstein’s only academic visit to the United States (Pinch & Swedberg 2012, 2), and accounts of his time here provide us with some of our most insightful descriptions of Wittgenstein as a person. Though the accounts of Wittgenstein’s stay in Ithaca have already been written (see Pinch & Swedberg 2012), I want to focus on an aspect of it that, in my view, has been somewhat underexplored: Wittgenstein’s long term influence on philosophy at Cornell, which is still felt 75 years later. I will argue that Wittgenstein’s time at Cornell had a particularly strong influence on the work of Max Black, and that Wittgenstein’s visit is at least partially responsible for the prevalence of anti-logical positivist themes in Cornell philosophy beginning in the 1950’s.
In order to understand the context of the philosophical landscape at Cornell in 1949, it is important to understand the philosophical work of three men: Norman Malcolm (1911-1990), Max Black (1909-1988), and Wittgenstein himself. Scholars generally divide Wittgenstein’s work into two periods: the early Wittgenstein, exemplified by the Tractatus, and the later Wittgenstein, exemplified by Philosophical Investigations (Biletzki & Matar 2021). In both his early and later periods, the philosophy of language was a central focus of Wittgenstein’s work. In the Tractatus, the early Wittgenstein expands on Bertrand Russell’s philosophy of logical atomism by developing an account in which the world is not a collection of objects, but rather, a collection of facts. These facts are expressible through language, making language the key to understanding the world. To the early Wittgenstein, there were no such things as genuine philosophical problems, just problems of language, and clarifying language would clarify the world (Biletzki & Matar 2021).
Wittgensten’s Tractatus eventually became one of the founding documents of logical positivism, a school of philosophy that developed in Vienna in the 1920’s. The logical positivists built on Wittgenstein’s conception of language to argue that if language represents facts about the world, then language is meaningful only insofar as it represents empirically verifiable aspects of the world, and saw it as their mission to use logic to perfectly clarify language (Encyclopædia Britannica n.d.). The logical positivists’ conception of empirical science included the claim that all sciences are reducible to physics, which represents the most basic facts about the world (Sage School of Philosophy 2015), and they endorsed anti-realist views of ethics (Sias n.d.). Though Wittgenstein himself never identified as a logical positivist, his influence on the movement was foundational and pervasive.
The later Wittgenstein, though, had a wholly different conception of language. A core idea in Philosophical Investigations (which is explicitly presented as a reaction against the Tractatus) is that language does not represent facts about the world, but rather, the meaning of language is in its use. Philosophical Investigations is more focused on the nature of language itself, and its role in society (Biletzki and Matar 2021). For our purposes, the most important thing to understand is that the early Wittgenstein was much closer to the logical positivists than the later Wittgenstein.
This brings us to Malcolm and Black, arguably the two most prominent personalities in Cornell’s philosophy department at the time. Both are fondly remembered at Cornell; Malcolm is perhaps the person most responsible for making Cornell one of the leading analytic departments in the United States (McDonough n.d.), and Black would go on to found the Cornell Society for the Humanities (Sage School of Philosophy 2015). Malcolm was a pupil of Wittgenstein during his time as a graduate student at Cambridge, and the two had shared a correspondence and friendship for about a decade by the time of Wittgenstein’s visit. Through his personal relationship with Wittgenstein, Malcolm had access to some of the as yet unpublished ideas that would eventually come to be Philosophical Investigations. Malcolm was a vocal defender of the later Wittgenstein, and one of the people most responsible for introducing his work to American philosophers (McDonough n.d.). Black, on the other hand, favored the early Wittgenstein (Pinch & Swedberg 2012, 6), and had written his dissertation on logical positivism (Abrams et al n.d.). Malcolm and Black’s ideological divide was also a personal one; though their relationship was professional, they disliked each other (Pinch & Swedberg 2012, 6). Wittgenstein, for his part, appears not to have thought particularly highly of Malcolm or Black as philosophers, and his decision to visit Malcolm in Ithaca seems to have had more to do with personal affection than professional interest (Pinch & Swedberg 2012, 7).
During his time in Ithaca, Wittgenstein only attended one official event, the meeting of the Philosophy Club described earlier. However, Wittgenstein quickly found himself surrounded by an informal circle of disciples, including Malcolm and Black, headquartered at Malcolm’s home (Pinch & Swedberg 2012, 7-8). Black’s inclusion in this group is especially notable, as his time with Malcolm and Wittgenstein (who, at this point, was well into his later years) would have exposed him to more sympathetic perspectives toward Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. As such, the fact that the nature of Black’s scholarship changed drastically shortly thereafter seems like more than a coincidence. While Black’s earlier work saw him exploring logic and the philosophy of mathematics (Abrams et al n.d.), disciplines that are closely associated with logical positivism, his subsequent writings began to align much more closely with the areas of interest to the later Wittgenstein. Starting in 1949, Black published Language and Philosophy, and later began writing about the ways people use language in everyday life, including Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy in 1962 and The Prevalence of Humbug³ in 1983 (Abrams et al n.d.). Black did not abandon his interest in the views of the early Wittgenstein, but Black’s shift toward a focus on language as it is used, akin to the later Wittgenstein, seems clear. Of course, it is impossible to know to what extent Black’s conversations with Wittgenstein and Malcolm in 1949 influenced this shift, but some degree of influence seems plausible.
Perhaps as a result of Black’s change in focus, anti-logical positivist themes became prevalent in Cornell’s philosophy department. Much of this can be traced back to the landmark publication of Willard Van Orman Quine’s paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in The Philosophical Review in 1953. Quine’s paper presents some of the most influential arguments against logical positivism and its publication is one of the key factors that led to logical positivism’s current loss in popularity (Godfrey-Smith 2003, 33). Though Quine was a professor at Harvard, not Cornell, The Philosophical Review was (and still is) edited entirely by Cornell philosophy faculty (Sage School of Philosophy 2015), meaning that it was Cornell philosophers who chose to publish the paper.
Furthermore, Cornell’s philosophy department proudly claims on its website that anti-reductionism about the sciences is a major theme in its history. Contrary to the logical positivists’ scientific reductionism, Cornell philosophers led by Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022) and Richard Boyd (1942-2021) championed the idea that the physical sciences are not all reducible to physics. To this day, Shaun Nichols begins his lectures in the philosophy of cognitive science by arguing that cognitive science is not reducible to other sciences (Nichols 2022). Cornell philosophers have also famously reacted against the logical positivists’ moral anti-realism: Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon (1942-2020), and David O. Brink (1958- ) developed a metaethical view called Cornell Realism (Lutz 2023).
Cornell’s philosophers are certainly not unique for rejecting logical positivism; it has been steadily losing popularity ever since Quine published “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” However, in this matter, Cornell has been consistently a catalyst and ahead of the curve, starting with the philosophy faculty’s decision to publish “Two Dogmas” in the first place. While Wittgenstein’s visit cannot be said to be entirely responsible for this phenomenon, I think it can be said that the faculty’s (especially Black’s) exposure to Wittgenstein’s later, anti-logical positivist philosophy during his visit influenced their attitudes towards logical positivism. In this sense, Wittgenstein’s visit to Cornell can be thought of as a significant event in the history of modern philosophy. Wittgenstein’s ten weeks in Ithaca has created repercussions that we are still experiencing 75 years on.
Notes:
- There is some disagreement on this point. Primary accounts from William Kennick, Norman Malcolm, and John Nelson agree that Vlastos’s paper was on Kant’s position of “ought implies can.” The dissenting voice, William H. Gass, maintains that the paper was on Reinhold Niebhur. See William Kennick, Memoirs, 1993-2008 (unpublished manuscript); John Nelson to Sister Mary Elwyn (Ithaca, NY: Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, August 13, 1966); John Nelson to William H. Gass (St. Louis, MO: The William Gass papers, Washington University in St. Louis, October 10, 1978); William H. Gass, “A Memory of a Master,” essay, in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 247–52, 247-249
- This is a narrative account drawn from the descriptions of the real event found in Pinch and Swedberg, “Wittgenstein’s visit to Ithaca in 1949,” 8-13
- When Black says “humbug,” he is referring to meaningless or deceptive language.
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