The evolution of my interest in Wittgenstein’s work followed very naturally the chronology of its publication and not any pre-determining criterion of preference.

In fact, I began as a student of Philosophy in Lisbon my first readings of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus (published in 1922), for which my only support in the secondary literature was the book by Erik Stenius (Wittgenstein was not yet known in Philosophy in Lisbon at least up to 1965).

But I only came to understand the book, and afterwards the Philosophical Investigations (published in 1953) in the regime of private tuition which Michael Dummett organised for me with Elisabeth Anscombe; and, in fact, at her home, on St. John’s Street, the same place where Wittgenstein occasionally passed some time. The circumstances were briefly the following.

As a Roman Catholic (in England there are non-Roman Catholics) I was a member of the Newman Society, where graduate students and professors gathered for discussion and conviviality, preceded in general by a paper read at the time and afterwards debated. Michael Dummett and Miss Anscombe (as she was known in Oxford) were also members of the Newman Society and, during a session in which both were present, Michael Dummett introduced me to the universally dreaded Miss Anscombe, with some favourable words on my behalf, “he reads Hilbert and Wittgenstein in German”.

Miss Anscombe had been in Cambridge the cherished disciple of Wittgenstein, and in Oxford she had taught Michael Dummett when he was still an undergraduate. Her high airs combined with an intensely sincere and intelligent expression in her eyes. She smoked cigarillos and was ultimately a loom of eccentricities; countless stories documented her obstinate cult of inaccessibility, which she, it was said, preserved ferociously and uncompromisingly. I recall that one of her most reported dicta among undergraduates in Philosophy was “Modern education is a permanent concession to the idiot”.  

Imagine my surprise when in the following day I received, in my college, an invitation from Miss Anscombe herself to have tea at her place. On Michael Dummett’s advice I took advantage of the invitation to ask her for tuition on Wittgenstein, certain already that she would refuse me, as she was known for doing. I had the good fortune of her accepting me (Dummett certainly worked as souffleur), and for two trimesters she gave me tuition, once a week, with the added originality of not asking for the tuition fee to which she had a right!   

As secondary literature we essentially used her book An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959), about which I had collected a catalogue of problems. Each sessions took place on Thursday mornings, when, after leaving my children at the Squirrel School on Rawlison Road, I went down to Wellington Square and walked the rest of the way, to prepare myself for Miss Anscombe’s smoky and ill-lit study on St. John’s Street.

 I would sit in front of her with my notebook and my books: I had prepared, for example, some problems and difficulties about elementary propositions; the session would begin with a long silence, during which I sometimes recited to myself my veni creator spiritus, mentes tuorum visita, by the end of which a dialogue like the following would begin:

She: Are you thinking?

Me: Yes.

(New silence.)

She: Intransitive?

Me: No.

(New silence.)

She: What about then?

Me: Elementary propositions.

(A longer silence.)

She: Give me an example of one.

Me: I can’t.

She: Very good.

At other times she would switch her attention off my catalogue and would put me some disturbing question like “Is ‘somebody’ the name of somebody?”, in which circumstance I had to go beyond my notes and, without giving the impression of being anxious, improvise a more or less plausible answer about the differences in denotation between names and pronouns. My answer would not be immediately followed by her comment but by a long pause, at the end of which the comment would then come up, rarely of assent, generally as an objection, with a counter-example which I could see had been invented by her in the moment.

Each session would go from 50 to 60 minutes, followed many times by tea; but even during tea the format of the dialogue used in the tutorial would continue, because it was by no means a moment of lesser focus or diminished conceptual acumen. The same difficulties would be repeated, as when, for example, she would grab hold of a cup of tea and ask me:

 “Would you trust Mr. Ballard’s memory?”

An adequate answer requires that one know the relevant passage of the Philosophical Investigations, but (and this is the essence of the Oxonian attitude) one must not say that one has recognised the allusion to the passage of the Investigations (I, 342), since the tutor already knows which it is; it is sufficient that one knows how to insert it into the organisation of the answer.

As translator of the Philosophical Investigations, she knew the text in any direction and was able to locate immediately each of the language-games described in the book, an idea which I saw used in the Suhrkamp edition, in which the language-games are catalogued in an index. As secondary literature we talked sometimes, essentially for the Investigations, about the anthology edited by George Pitcher; about her book Intention; and about her husband’s, Peter Geach, book Mental Acts.

 * Translated from the original Portuguese by Pedro Ferrão. This is part of a larger interview published under the title “Uma Entrevista a M. S. Lourenço.” (Tamen, Miguel. 2007. A Teoria do Programa – Uma Homenagem a Maria de Lourdes Ferraz e a M. S. Lourenço. org. António M. Feijó and Miguel Tamen. Lisbon: Programme in Literary Theory of the University of Lisbon.)