Career
Rhees taught philosophy at Swansea University from 1940 to 1966. He has been known mainly as a Wittgenstein exegete and for his influence on his friends, colleague Peter Winch and former student and his literary executor D. Z. Phillips. He was responsible for editing but also developing the legacy left by Wittgenstein, at times emphasising religious and ethical understandings of Wittgenstein's work, reflecting is how Wittgenstein himself sometimes said he wanted to be understood. Together with G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe he was appointed by Wittgenstein as one his literary executor. He was also Wittgenstein's personal executor.
Rhees was also influential in bringing the work of other philosophers to greater attention, notably for example the French philosopher, Simone Weil.
For a time, he was visiting Professor at King's College London, and with Winch and Norman Malcolm formed a 'formidable triumvirate' of Wittgensteinans.
Rhees returned to Swansea in 1982 after the death of his wife, where he continued to teach, leading weekly post-graduate seminars from 1983 and, in the Cambridge tradition, welcoming a few students in 'at home' sessions for more detailed discussions of their research work. He also attended weekly meetings of the Philosophical Society he founded (around 1940) and which counted Wittgenstein as chief amongst those eminent philosophers who addressed it in the years when Rhees was a lecturer at Swansea (retiring in 1966). It was also a forum in which students were expected to test and sharpen their philosophical wits. It was clear in these seminars that Rhees was not only devoted to exegesis of one of the finest thinkers of the twentieth century, but was, in fact, constantly absorbed in developing his own profound insights in Philosophy in repeated tours de force. He was self-effacing of his capacities and had to be persuaded to accept an honorary professorship at Swansea where he had previously turned down promotion during his teaching career.
He died on 22 May 1989, and is buried in Oystermouth cemetery in Mumbles near Swansea.
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