Peter Guy Winch (14 January 1926 – 27 April 1997) was a Britishphilosopher known for his contributions to thephilosophy of social science,Wittgenstein scholarship,ethics, and thephilosophy of religion. His early bookThe Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958) was an attack onpositivism in thesocial sciences, drawing on the work ofR. G. Collingwood andLudwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

Winch was born on 14 January 1926, inWalthamstow,London. He attendedLeyton County High School for boys,^[2] before going up toSt Edmund Hall, Oxford to readPhilosophy, Politics and Economics. Following the outbreak of World War II, he served in theRoyal Navy 1944–47, before graduating from theUniversity of Oxford in 1949.^[3]

He was a lecturer in philosophy at the thenUniversity College of Swansea from 1951 until 1964. He was influenced by his colleaguesRush Rhees andR.F. Holland, both experts in the philosophy ofLudwig Wittgenstein. In 1964, he moved toBirkbeck College,University of London, before becoming Professor of Philosophy atKing's College London in 1967. During this period, he served as president ofAristotelian Society, from 1980 to 1981. In 1985 Winch moved to the United States to become Professor at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.^[4]

He died on the 27 April 1997, inChampaign, Illinois.^[3][5]

He was survived by his wife Erika Neumann and his two sons, Christopher and David.

Major influences upon Winch includeLudwig Wittgenstein,Rush Rhees,R. G. Collingwood andSimone Weil. He gave rise to a form of philosophy that has been given the name 'sociologism'.^[6] He also bears responsibility for a small school of sociology that was prepared to accept his radical criticism of the subject.^[7]

Winch saw himself as an uncompromising Wittgensteinian. He was not personally acquainted with Wittgenstein; Wittgenstein's influence upon him was mostly mediated through that of Rush Rhees, who was his colleague at the University College of Swansea, now known asSwansea University, and whom Wittgenstein appointed as one of his literary executors.^[8] Winch's translation of Wittgenstein'sVermischte Bemerkungen (as edited byGeorg Henrik von Wright) was published in 1980 asCulture and Value (with a new translation by Winch of a revised edition by Alois Pichler appearing in 1998).^[9] After the death of Rhees in 1989, Winch took over his position as literary executor.^[5]

From Rush Rhees, Winch derived his interest in the religious writer Simone Weil. Part of the appeal was a break from Wittgenstein into a very different type of philosophy which could nevertheless be tackled with familiar methods. Also Weil's ascetic, somewhatTolstoyan, form of religion harmonised with one aspect of Wittgenstein's personality.

At a time when most Anglo-American philosophers were heavily under the spell of Wittgenstein, Winch's own approach was strikingly original. While much of his work was concerned with rescuing Wittgenstein from what he took to be misreadings, his own philosophy involved a shift of emphasis from the problems that preoccupied Oxford style‘linguistic’ philosophy, towards justifying and explaining 'forms of life' in terms of consistentlanguage games. He took Wittgensteinian philosophy into areas ofethics and religion, which Wittgenstein himself had relatively neglected, sometimes showing considerable originality. An example is his illuminating treatment of the moral difference between someone who tries and fails to commit murder and someone who succeeds, in his essay "Trying" inEthics and Action. With the decline of interest in Wittgenstein, Winch himself was increasingly neglected and the challenge his arguments presented to much contemporary philosophy was sidestepped or ignored. In insisting on the continuity of Wittgenstein's concerns from theTractatus through to thePhilosophical Investigations, Winch made a powerful case for Wittgenstein's mature philosophy, as he understood it, as the consummation and legitimate heir of the entire analytic tradition.^[10]

Wittgenstein famously said that philosophy leaves the world as it is.^[11] Winch takes his ideas into regions that have strong moral and political implications.

Authored

• The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, London 1958.^[12][13]
  • 2nd edition, with new preface, London 1990.
• Ethics And Action, London 1972.^[14]
• Trying to Make Sense, Oxford 1987.^[15][16]
• Simone Weil, the Just Balance, Cambridge 1989.^[17]
• Spinoza on ethics and understanding, London 2020.ISBN 9781785275432.^[18]

Translated/edited

• Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980, revised edition 1998). Both editions translated by Peter Winch.
• Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (1969). Edited, with an introductory essay, by Peter Winch.^[19][20]

• "Understanding a primitive society" 1964,American Philosophical Quarterly I, pp.307–324, reprinted inPhillips, D. Z., ed. (1967).Religion and understanding. New York : Macmillan.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)^[21]
• "Ceasing to Exist"Proceedings of the British Academy 68, 1982 (1983)
• "Certainty and Authority".Wittgenstein centenary essays.Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement.28: 223–237.(1991)
• "Persuasion".The Wittgenstein Legacy,Midwest Studies in Philosophy.17: 123–137. (1992)
• “Discussion of Malcolm’s Essay”. In Malcolm, N.Wittgenstein: a Religious Point of View, ed. Peter Winch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 95–135.

See also:works by Peter Winch atPhilPapers

• Philosophy as the Art of DisagreementOn the Social and Moral Philosophy of Peter Winch by Lars Hertzberg
• Peter Winch 1926–97 byRupert Read [Archived byWayback Machine]
• Winch, Malcolm, and the Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy byCora Diamond (excerpt from "Peter Winch on theTractatus and the unity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy")
• PETER WINCH, PHILOSOPHY TEACHER obituary by Kenan Heise for theCHICAGO TRIBUNE (Archived by Wayback Machine)
• The Legendary Peter Winch and the Myth of ‘Social Science Introduction toThere is No Such Thing as a Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch (2008) by Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read and Wes Sharrock.
• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oxford 1958
• Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, London 1922

• 1926 births
• 1997 deaths
• Analytic philosophers
• Wittgensteinian philosophers
• Alumni of St Edmund Hall, Oxford
• Academics of Birkbeck, University of London
• Academics of King's College London
• Philosophers of social science
• British ethicists
• British philosophers of religion
• 20th-century English philosophers
• Presidents of the Aristotelian Society
• 20th-century British historians
• People from Walthamstow

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