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Alice Ambrose

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The Woman Who Got Herself Excommunicated by Wittgenstein

In 1935, Ludwig Wittgenstein—one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, a man whose every word his students treated as revelation—abruptly cut off all contact with Alice Ambrose. Her crime? Publishing an article.

Not just any article, mind you. An article about his ideas. An article she wrote with encouragement from G.E. Moore, another giant of analytic philosophy. An article intended to explain Wittgenstein's position on finitism in mathematics to a wider philosophical audience.

Wittgenstein was furious. In his view, she had betrayed him.

This dramatic rupture reveals something essential about both figures. Wittgenstein, notoriously controlling about how his ideas were presented, believed philosophy should be done a certain way—his way—and on his timeline. Ambrose, despite being a devoted student, ultimately believed that ideas belonged to the world once spoken. Her intellectual independence cost her a friendship, but it also helped preserve some of Wittgenstein's most important transitional work for posterity.

An Unlikely Path to Cambridge

Alice Loman Ambrose came from the least promising circumstances imaginable for a future philosopher. Born in Lexington, Illinois, in 1906, she was orphaned at thirteen. The early twentieth-century Midwest offered few models for a young woman aspiring to intellectual life.

Yet she pursued it anyway.

She studied philosophy and mathematics at Millikin University, a small liberal arts college in Decatur, Illinois. After completing her undergraduate work in 1928, she went on to earn a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1932. This was unusual enough for a woman of her era. What came next was extraordinary.

Ambrose crossed the Atlantic to study at Cambridge University, where she would earn a second doctorate—this time from Newnham College, one of the women's colleges, in 1938. At Cambridge, she had the remarkable fortune of studying with both G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two philosophers whose debates and methodological differences would shape the entire trajectory of analytic philosophy.

The Forbidden Notebooks

Wittgenstein's teaching style was theatrical and demanding. He lectured without notes, thinking out loud, working through problems in real time. His students sat in rapt attention, following the twists and turns of his philosophical investigations. And they were absolutely forbidden from taking notes.

Wittgenstein believed that writing things down distorted the process. Philosophy wasn't about capturing conclusions; it was about the activity of thinking itself. Recording his words, in his view, would transform living thought into dead text.

Alice Ambrose and her fellow student Margaret MacDonald disagreed. Secretly, they wrote down what Wittgenstein said in his lectures. These clandestine notes would eventually be published, becoming crucial documents for understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical development.

But their most important contribution came through a different channel altogether.

The Blue and Brown Books

Between 1933 and 1935, Wittgenstein dictated a series of philosophical remarks to a small group of students. Ambrose was among this select circle. These dictations were collected and circulated in typescript form, bound in blue and brown paper covers—hence their eventual titles, the Blue Book and the Brown Book.

These texts occupy a unique place in twentieth-century philosophy. They document Wittgenstein's transition between his two masterworks. His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, had proposed a logical picture theory of language and meaning. By the time of his death in 1951, his views had transformed radically, culminating in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations.

But how did he get from one to the other?

The Blue and Brown Books show us. They capture Wittgenstein thinking his way out of his earlier positions, experimenting with new approaches, developing the concept of language games and family resemblances that would become central to his later philosophy. Without the students who received these dictations—and preserved them—this transitional thinking might have been lost entirely.

There's also a Yellow Book, less famous but equally valuable. It consists of notes taken by Ambrose and Margaret Masterman during the intervals between dictation sessions for the Blue Book. Even the margins of Wittgenstein's teaching proved philosophically significant.

The Article That Ended Everything

In 1935, Ambrose decided to publish an article titled "Finitism in Mathematics" in the journal Mind, one of the most prestigious philosophical publications in the English-speaking world.

Finitism is the view that mathematics should only concern itself with finite objects and operations. An extreme finitist might reject the concept of infinity altogether, or at least insist that mathematical objects must be constructible in some concrete sense. Wittgenstein's views on the philosophy of mathematics were notoriously subtle and difficult to pin down, but he had expressed sympathy for finitist approaches.

Ambrose's article attempted to explain his position. G.E. Moore encouraged her to publish it. This was, after all, what philosophers do: they develop ideas, discuss them, publish them, and let the wider community engage with them.

Wittgenstein saw it differently.

He felt his ideas had been taken from him before he was ready to present them. He had not authorized this explanation of his views. He had not approved the framing. The relationship was over.

Ambrose returned to the United States that same year, taking a position at the University of Michigan. Whatever pain the break with Wittgenstein caused her, she did not let it derail her career.

A Life in Logic

In 1937, Ambrose joined the faculty of Smith College, the prestigious women's liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts. She would remain there for the rest of her career, eventually being awarded the Austin and Sophia Smith chair in Philosophy in 1964 and becoming professor emeritus in 1972.

At Smith, she found an intellectual partner in Morris Lazerowitz, whom she married. Together, they became a formidable team in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. Their textbook Fundamentals of Symbolic Logic, first published in 1948, became so widely used that it was simply known in academic circles as "Ambrose and Lazerowitz."

Symbolic logic, for those unfamiliar with the field, is the use of mathematical symbols and formal rules to analyze reasoning. Instead of arguing in plain English about whether a conclusion follows from its premises, symbolic logic translates everything into symbols—letters for propositions, special marks for operations like "and," "or," and "not"—and then applies rigorous rules to determine validity. It's the mathematical foundation beneath computer science, artificial intelligence, and much of modern philosophy.

Ambrose wasn't just teaching logic; she was shaping how a generation of students learned to think precisely.

Editor and Scholar

From 1953 to 1968, Ambrose served as editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, the preeminent publication in the field. This role placed her at the center of an international scholarly community, deciding which papers would shape the discipline and which would not.

Her own scholarly output continued steadily. With her husband, she produced Logic: The Theory of Formal Inference in 1961, Philosophical Theories in 1976, and Essays in the Unknown Wittgenstein in 1984. This last title is particularly notable: decades after being banished from Wittgenstein's circle, Ambrose was still contributing to the world's understanding of his thought.

She also co-edited Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language in 1972, a collection of essays examining his work. The title she had once been forbidden to publish about was now the subject of a volume bearing her name on the cover.

The Teacher Who Never Stopped

Retirement, for Alice Ambrose, was a technicality. After becoming professor emeritus in 1972, she continued to teach and guest lecture at Smith, Hampshire College, the University of Delaware, and other institutions around the country. She was still doing this into the 1990s.

One of her late publications, from 1989, was titled "Moore and Wittgenstein as Teachers." Having studied with both of analytic philosophy's founding figures, she was uniquely positioned to compare their pedagogical styles and philosophical temperaments. The article appeared in Teaching Philosophy, a journal devoted to improving philosophical education—a fitting venue for someone who had spent more than half a century in the classroom.

Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz died on January 25, 2001, in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was ninety-four years old. Her personal papers remain at the Smith College Archives, available to scholars who want to understand her contributions to logic, philosophy of mathematics, and the preservation of Wittgenstein's legacy.

What Her Story Tells Us

There's something deeply satisfying about Ambrose's trajectory. Orphaned young, educated in the American Midwest, she traveled to Cambridge and joined the inner circle of one of history's most demanding philosophers. When that philosopher cast her out for the sin of sharing his ideas with the world, she didn't crumble. She built a distinguished career anyway.

She also outlived him by fifty years.

The notes she took—the forbidden ones, the secret ones—became essential documents for understanding Wittgenstein's development. The textbook she wrote became a standard. The journal she edited shaped a discipline. The students she taught went on to teach others.

Wittgenstein wanted to control how his ideas entered the world. He couldn't. No one can. Ideas escape their originators the moment they're spoken. Alice Ambrose understood this, and she spent her career putting that understanding into practice.

Perhaps that's why Wittgenstein was so angry. Not because she had misrepresented him, but because she had demonstrated something he couldn't accept: that his thoughts belonged to anyone willing to think them through.