The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry

Maurice O’Connor Drury was among Wittgenstein’s first students after his return to Cambridge in 1929. The subsequent course of Drury’s life and thought was to be enormously influenced by his teacher. The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drurybrings together the best of his lectures, conversations, and letters on philosophy, religion and medicine.

Central to the collection is the Danger of Words, the 1973 text described by Ray Monk as ’the most truly Wittgensteinian book published by any of Wittgenstein’s students’. Through notes on conversations with Wittgenstein, letters to a student of philosophy and correspondence of almost 30 years with Rush Rhees, Drury gives shape to what he had learned from Wittgenstein. Whether discussing philosophy, Simone Weil or the power of hypnosis, he makes fascinating excursions into the bearing of Wittgenstein’s thought on philosophy and the practice of medicine and psychiatry.

Alongside a foreword by Monk and an introduction presenting a new biography of Drury, analysing the relationship between him and Wittgenstein, this collection features previously unpublished archival sources. Beautifully written and carefully selected, each piece reveals the impact of Wittgenstein’s teachings, shedding light on the friendship and thinking of one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.

John Hayes is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland.

Ray Monk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, UK. He has published award-winning biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. His most recent book is Inside the Centre: the Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2012, Jonathan Cape).