(Arthur) John Terence Dibben Wisdom, the British analytic philosopher, was closely associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose chair in philosophy at Cambridge he held. Wisdom became professor of philosophy there in 1952. He took his B.A. degree at Cambridge in 1924 and his M.A. there in 1934.

The philosophical problem on which Wisdom wrote the most is the question of what the nature of philosophy is, and his writings reflect his changing views concerning the proper answer to this question. His writings can be divided into two groups: those through 1934, putting forward one answer to the question, and those after 1936, consisting of successive attempts to make clear a quite different view of the nature of philosophy, along with applications of this new approach to a number of familiar first-level philosophical problems.

Logical Constructions

Wisdom's first book, Interpretation and Analysis (1931), compares...