The Queen's College Record 2020

As a tutor at Queen’s, McGuinness was responsible for teaching ancient philosophy to
the classical students, and in conjunction with Lorenzo Minio-Paluello he conducted a
University seminar on the legacy of Aristotle. This was much appreciated by the more
erudite connoisseurs. But his own research interests came to focus more and more
on Ludwig Wittgenstein and the circles to which he belonged. In 1959 he published,
jointly with David Pears, a translation of Wittgenstein’s early work Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus. This was designed to replace the 1921 translation by C K Ogden, though
some readers continued to prefer the earlier, less accurate but more florid version.
Obituaries
McGuinness was a fluent linguist, and the next major publication he edited was
published in German, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis (1967). This appeared
in English two years later as Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Later he was
responsible for the publication of an extensive series of volumes of writings of the
major figures of the Vienna Circle.
Wittgenstein’s own major writings appeared posthumously in the decades after his
death in 1951: they were edited, and sometimes translated, by the literary executors
he had named in his will, Elizabeth Anscombe, Georg Henrik von Wright and Rush
Rhees. But the executors gave McGuinness permission to publish minor elements from
the Nachlass, in particular items of correspondence. Thus, in 1968 there appeared an
edition of Paul Engelmann’s correspondence with Wittgenstein, along with a memoir.
This was followed in 1971 by Prototractatus, an edition and translation of an earlier
version of the Tractatus that McGuinness had previously translated with Pears.
By this time McGuinness’s first marriage had broken up. In 1970 he was married a
second time, to Elizabeth Groag of Brno in Czechoslovakia. By her he had a second
son. However, the marriage did not last until the end of the decade, and finally ended
in divorce in 2008.
Throughout his life McGuinness collected material for a biography of Wittgenstein. The
first volume of this appeared in 1988 under the title Wittgenstein, a Life: Vol. 1. Young
Ludwig. This was widely admired; it was reissued as a Penguin and translated into
French and German, but no further volumes ever appeared. Perhaps McGuinness felt
that he had been upstaged by the less philosophical but more popular biography of
Wittgenstein published by Ray Monk in 1990.
None the less, McGuinness continued to publish volumes of Wittgensteinian
correspondence. In 1995 he produced a volume of Cambridge Letters, including
some of great philosophical interest from Russell, Keynes, Moore and Ramsey. This
appeared in a much amplified fourth edition in 2012, under the title Wittgenstein in
Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951.
While an Oxford tutor McGuinness held visiting professorships in Seattle, Beijing,
Leyden, Rome, Graz and Stanford. In 1988 he left Queen’s and Oxford, and for
the next two years held a post at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. In
College Record 2020 | The Queen’s College 131