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Oets Kolk Bouwsma

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The Philosopher Who Talked Philosophy Out of Its Bad Habits

In 1949, Ludwig Wittgenstein—arguably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century—arrived at Cornell University for a visit. Waiting for him was a man from Nebraska named Oets Kolk Bouwsma, known to everyone simply as O.K. The two would spend the next two years in intense philosophical conversation, discussions so significant that Bouwsma's notebooks recording them have become essential reading for anyone trying to understand Wittgenstein's ideas.

But Bouwsma was no mere disciple taking notes at the master's feet. He was a thinker who had spent decades wrestling with the same questions Wittgenstein had, arriving at many of the same conclusions through his own circuitous path. Their meeting was less a teacher instructing a student and more a recognition between kindred spirits who had both discovered that philosophy's deepest problems might not be problems at all—just confusions built into the way we talk.

From Dutch Reformed Michigan to the Borderlands of Sense

Bouwsma was born on November 22, 1898, in Muskegon, Michigan, to Dutch immigrants who maintained fierce loyalty to their heritage. The household spoke Dutch for Bible readings and mealtime prayers. Young Oets grew up immersed in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, a denomination with roots stretching back to the Dutch Reformed tradition that shaped so much of European intellectual history.

This religious upbringing wasn't something Bouwsma would later abandon or rebel against. Quite the opposite. He remained, as one biographer put it, "a devoted reader of Scriptures, and a lifelong lover of the reformed church." This mattered philosophically. When Bouwsma later turned his analytical tools to religious concepts, he did so not as an outsider critiquing belief, but as someone who had spent a lifetime participating in the actual practices of faith.

His academic path took him through Calvin College (completing the three-year course in 1919, while also serving in the Student Army Training Corps during World War I) and then to the University of Michigan. There he earned his bachelor's degree in 1920, his master's in 1922, and finally his doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on the British idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley.

Idealism, in the philosophical sense, is the view that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual rather than material. Bradley represented the tail end of a grand tradition arguing that what we call the "external world" is really a construction of mind or experience. The young Bouwsma was drawn to these ideas.

But he wouldn't stay there.

The Problem with Philosophers' Sentences

During his years at Michigan and then as a new professor at the University of Nebraska (where he arrived in 1928 and would remain for nearly four decades), Bouwsma began gravitating toward the work of G.E. Moore.

Moore represented something different in philosophy. Where idealists constructed elaborate systems arguing that reality wasn't what common sense suggested, Moore defended common sense itself. When a philosopher claimed that time was unreal or that the external world might not exist, Moore's characteristic response was to hold up his hands and say: "Here is one hand, and here is another. Therefore at least two external objects exist."

This might sound simplistic, even like missing the point. But Moore was onto something. He was suggesting that when philosophical theories conflict with things we know more certainly than we could ever know any philosophical argument, perhaps the theory is what needs to go.

Bouwsma was attracted to this approach but not entirely satisfied. He saw that Moore, despite his common-sense starting point, still talked in certain peculiar ways—particularly about something called "sense data." The idea was that when you see a tomato, you don't directly perceive the tomato itself but rather some mental representation, a "sense datum" that stands between you and the world.

Bouwsma published a significant paper on this in 1942, "Moore's Theory of Sense-Data," and in working through Moore's language he began developing what would become his signature method: looking carefully at how philosophers talk and asking whether their sentences actually make sense.

Joyce, Shakespeare, and the Ear for Language

Here's something that distinguished Bouwsma from most academic philosophers: he was obsessed with literature. James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Shakespeare. Dickens. His copies of Joyce's novels were filled with marginal notes, evidence of how completely he was consumed by Joyce's wordplay.

This wasn't a side hobby. It was central to his philosophical method.

Philosophers, Bouwsma came to believe, get into trouble because they're not careful enough about language. They use words in strange ways, construct sentences that seem meaningful but actually aren't, and then spend centuries arguing about puzzles that only exist because of these linguistic mistakes. Someone trained to hear the music in Joyce's prose, to catch Shakespeare's double meanings, might be better equipped to spot when philosophical language has gone off the rails.

He wrote on the "truth" of poetry, on the relationship between words and music in his essay "The Expression Theory of Art." These weren't diversions from philosophy but training grounds for it.

The Wittgenstein Connection

The story of how Bouwsma encountered Wittgenstein's ideas is a tale of philosophical networking at its finest.

From his position in Nebraska, Bouwsma had sent students to Cambridge to study with Moore. One of these was Morris Lazerowitz, whose wife Alice Ambrose had studied with both Moore and Wittgenstein. It was Ambrose who introduced Bouwsma to The Blue Book—a set of lecture notes that Wittgenstein had dictated in 1933-34, circulated among students but not yet published.

Another of Bouwsma's students, Norman Malcolm, went on to become one of the most important interpreters of Wittgenstein's thought in America. After studying with Wittgenstein at Cambridge, Malcolm ended up teaching at Cornell and was able to arrange for Wittgenstein to visit there. Crucially, Malcolm also arranged for Bouwsma to teach at Cornell during that very visit.

So in 1949, with a leave from Nebraska and a Fulbright Fellowship in hand, Bouwsma finally met Wittgenstein in person. The two spent much of the next two years in philosophical conversation—at Cornell, at Smith College, and at Oxford.

What exactly was Wittgenstein offering that so captivated Bouwsma?

Philosophy as Therapy

Wittgenstein's later philosophy—the work he developed after abandoning his earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—proposed something radical. Philosophical problems, he suggested, aren't genuine problems awaiting genuine solutions. They're confusions arising from misunderstandings about how language works.

Consider a classic philosophical puzzle: How can I ever know that other people have minds? I can observe your behavior, but I can't directly access your inner experiences. For all I know, you might be a sophisticated automaton with no inner life at all.

Wittgenstein's approach wasn't to solve this problem but to dissolve it. He would ask: How did we ever learn words like "pain" and "thought" and "feeling"? We learned them in contexts involving other people, assuming they had experiences like ours. The very language we use to formulate the skeptical problem already presupposes what the skeptic claims to doubt. The "problem" only seems like a problem because we've been misled by our own words.

Wittgenstein famously described philosophy's task as showing "the fly the way out of the fly-bottle"—helping us escape traps we've constructed for ourselves through linguistic confusion.

For Bouwsma, this was revelatory. He'd been groping toward something similar in his work on Moore, trying to show that philosophers' claims about "sense data" didn't actually mean what they seemed to mean. Now Wittgenstein was offering a systematic way of understanding what had gone wrong and how to correct it.

The Method in Action

Bouwsma didn't simply adopt Wittgenstein's ideas wholesale. He developed his own distinctive application of what became known as "ordinary language philosophy."

His technique involved taking philosophical sentences and carefully comparing them with actual sentences of everyday life. When a philosopher says, "We can never really know the external world," Bouwsma would ask: In what circumstances would someone normally say this? What would we be trying to communicate? And then he'd show that the philosopher's sentence doesn't function like any ordinary sentence. It seems meaningful because it uses familiar words, but those words have been subtly disconnected from their normal uses.

He applied this method to Berkeley's idealism. George Berkeley, the 18th-century Irish philosopher, had argued that material objects don't exist independently of perception—"to be is to be perceived." Berkeley thought objects were really just collections of "ideas" in minds.

Rather than refuting Berkeley with counter-arguments, Bouwsma tried to show that Berkeley's claims literally didn't make sense. What work is the word "idea" doing in Berkeley's philosophy? In ordinary life, we talk about having ideas—ideas for dinner, ideas about politics, creative ideas. But Berkeley was using "idea" to mean something like "mental image" or "perception," and he was claiming that chairs and tables were made of these. Bouwsma's strategy was to tease out how this supposedly technical use of "idea" didn't actually cohere, how Berkeley was, in Wittgenstein's phrase, "idling" with language that had been disconnected from any genuine use.

His work on Descartes took the same approach. Descartes famously argued that we might be deceived by an evil demon, that our senses might be systematically misleading us, that perhaps we're dreaming right now. Bouwsma examined what it would actually mean to say such things, showing how Descartes's skeptical scenarios, when pressed, turn out not to describe coherent possibilities at all.

Meaning Is Use

One of Wittgenstein's most famous slogans was that "meaning is use"—the meaning of a word isn't some object it names or some idea it expresses, but rather is found in how the word is actually used in practice.

Bouwsma wrote extensively on this idea, working through its implications with what colleagues described as tireless effort. At first, he made the mistake many readers make: treating "meaning is use" as another philosophical theory, as if Wittgenstein were claiming that meaning is identical to use in the way a scientist might claim that water is identical to H₂O.

Eventually, Bouwsma grasped that Wittgenstein wasn't offering a theory at all. The phrase "meaning is use" was meant as a therapeutic reminder, a way of redirecting attention when we find ourselves confused. It's not that meaning is use in some deep metaphysical sense; it's that when we're puzzled about what a word means, we should look at how it's used rather than searching for some mysterious entity that the word supposedly refers to.

This understanding crystallized in Bouwsma's accomplished article simply titled "The Blue Book," which described the aims and methods of Wittgenstein's approach. The essay earned him recognition as a significant interpreter of Wittgenstein's ideas and contributed to his being invited to deliver the first John Locke Lectures at Oxford University—a prestigious honor in philosophical circles.

Faith and Philosophy

What makes Bouwsma especially interesting is how he brought his philosophical methods to bear on his religious commitments.

He never abandoned the Christian Reformed Church of his youth. But he also didn't compartmentalize, keeping his faith in one box and his philosophy in another. Instead, he carefully examined the language of religion using the same techniques he applied to philosophical puzzles.

One of his key insights concerned the word "belief." We use this word in many contexts: "I believe it's going to rain," "I believe the defendant is guilty," "I believe in God." Bouwsma noticed that the uses of "belief" in religious settings differ profoundly from uses in everyday non-religious contexts. To say "I believe in God" isn't to express a hypothesis about the universe the way "I believe it's going to rain" expresses a hypothesis about the weather. Religious belief, Bouwsma argued, functions differently—it's bound up with participation in a community, with practices of worship and prayer, with a way of life.

Here he found deep resonance with another thinker: the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had emphasized "subjectivity" in religious matters, insisting that Christianity wasn't an objective system of metaphysics but an invitation to a new way of living. This connected naturally to Wittgenstein's idea that we understand language through its use in particular forms of life.

Bouwsma's essays on these themes were collected in a volume titled Without Proof or Evidence. The title is deliberately provocative. Traditional philosophy of religion often tried to prove God's existence or provide evidence for religious claims. Bouwsma was suggesting that this entire approach misunderstands what religious language is doing.

The Teacher's Legacy

Bouwsma taught at the University of Nebraska from 1928 until mandatory retirement in 1965, then moved to the University of Texas at Austin where he continued until 1977, the year before his death. He served as President of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1957-58 and received an honorary doctorate from Nebraska in 1975.

Yet his greatest influence came not through publications but through teaching.

This is unusual. Most philosophers build reputations through their written work. Bouwsma wrote incessantly—his notebooks filled hundreds of legal pads—but published comparatively little during his lifetime. His one book, Philosophical Essays, appeared only toward the end of his career.

What he did instead was train graduate students in his distinctive method of "exploring the borderlands of sense and nonsense in philosophical sentences." This is a skill that's hard to convey in writing but can be transmitted through the kind of patient, example-rich discussion that happens in seminar rooms. His students went on to spread this approach throughout American philosophy departments.

After his death in 1978, two former students—J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit—collected and edited several additional volumes of his papers and notebooks. The most significant of these is Wittgenstein Conversations, 1949-51, Bouwsma's notes from his discussions with Wittgenstein. These have become a primary source for scholars trying to understand Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

The Quiet Revolution

It's easy to miss how radical Bouwsma's approach actually was. At first glance, ordinary language philosophy might seem like mere pedantry—quibbling about words while ignoring the deep questions philosophers have grappled with for millennia.

But consider what's really being claimed. Traditional philosophy assumes that questions like "What is truth?" or "What is the nature of time?" or "How can we know the external world exists?" are genuine questions with genuine answers waiting to be discovered. The history of philosophy is largely the history of proposed answers and the arguments against them.

Bouwsma (following Wittgenstein) was suggesting something more unsettling: that many of these questions arise from linguistic confusion and dissolve once we see clearly how our words actually work. The problems don't get solved; they get shown to have been pseudo-problems all along.

This doesn't mean all philosophical questions are confused. It doesn't mean clear thinking is unimportant. If anything, it demands more careful attention to language, more rigorous examination of what we mean by what we say. Philosophy becomes, in Wittgenstein's phrase, a "battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

For Bouwsma, this battle was fought with humor and literary sensitivity, with careful comparison of philosophers' sentences to ordinary speech, with patient work on texts from Descartes to Berkeley to Moore. It was also fought in the context of a life that included deep religious commitment, love of Joyce and Shakespeare, and decades of teaching in the American Midwest.

His papers and notebooks remain at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, waiting for scholars who want to understand how one philosopher navigated the space between faith and reason, between ordinary language and philosophical confusion, between the Dutch Reformed Church of his childhood and the cutting edge of twentieth-century thought.