Norman Malcolm

Norman Malcolm was the American friend through whom many readers first met Wittgenstein as a person. Born in Kansas in 1911, he came to Cambridge in 1938-39, attended Wittgenstein's lectures and studied with G.E. Moore, and returned in 1946-47. He taught at Cornell University from 1947 to 1978 and made it, for a while, one of the main centres of Wittgensteinian philosophy in the United States.

The memoir and the summer in Ithaca

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958) is a short, vivid portrait: the walks, the cinema, the detective magazines Malcolm sent from America, the moral intensity that could be both inspiring and exhausting. It also records the words Wittgenstein is reported to have said before he died: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." In the summer of 1949 Wittgenstein stayed with Malcolm in Ithaca. Their conversations about Moore's claim to know that "here is a hand" fed directly into the notes later published as On Certainty.

What he did with it

Malcolm was among the first to explain the later philosophy to American readers. His long review of the Philosophical Investigations (1954) gave an influential account of the private language argument. The essays in Knowledge and Certainty (1963) explore the difference between knowing something and the certainty of the framework within which we know anything, the theme now discussed as hinge propositions. Later books argued against both Cartesian introspection and the identification of thoughts with brain states: we ascribe pain and belief to others by public criteria, while our own first-person reports express rather than observe.

Where he goes further than Wittgenstein

Malcolm sometimes took steps Wittgenstein did not. In Dreaming (1959) he pushed the emphasis on public criteria to a startling conclusion: the idea of dreams as conscious experiences during sleep makes no sense, since nothing could check a dream report except the report itself. Many critics, as the Stanford Encyclopedia notes, found this too close to verificationism, and it rests on a reading of "criteria" that many Wittgensteinians reject.

In 1960 he defended a version of Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, while Wittgenstein thought religious belief was not a matter of proof at all. And in Nothing is Hidden (1986) Malcolm stressed the break between the Tractatus and the later work, against Peter Winch, who saw more continuity. Winch later edited Malcolm's last book, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, and added a reply questioning its reading. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a fair overview of these debates.