Journal of the History of Philosophy

abstract:

Alice Ambrose (1906–2001) worked throughout her intellectual life to unpack her teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein's contributions to philosophy. Unlike her more renowned Cambridge-educated colleagues, Ambrose endeavored as an American logician to account for how it was that Wittgenstein challenged not only philosophers' prior conceptions of ordinary language but also the very epistemic premises on which doing philosophy was conceived. For as she maintained, the "peace" Wittgenstein offered philosophy was in effect the dissolution of mathematicallogical misunderstandings. Drawing on materials both private and published, this article seeks to uncover the transatlantic origins of Ambrose's postwar meditations on the resolution of philosophical problems in mathematical logic. Throughout, I will show that a key to understanding the American reception of Wittgenstein's "therapeutic" philosophy after 1945 is Ambrose's unique engagement with her teacher's work and with the history of philosophy.