‘it is a person’s privilege to go to hell’

Until recently, I knew exactly one story about Alice Ambrose, to whom (along with Francis Skinner), Ludwig Wittgenstein dictated what would come to be known as the “Brown Book” in 1934-35. The story turns out to be false.

It appears in Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius:

[Ambrose] planned to publish in Mind an article entitled ‘Finitism in Mathematics’, in which she would present what she took to be Wittgenstein’s view on the matter. The article annoyed Wittgenstein intensely, and he tried hard to persuade her not to publish it. When she and G. E. Moore, who was then editor of the journal, refused to succumb to this pressure, he abruptly ended any association with her.

As I learned from Sophia Connell’s essay, “Alice Ambrose and Early Analytic Philosophy,” Wittgenstein tried more than persuasion, and did so after the first part of the essay was published in April 1935. Going by a letter Ambrose wrote to Wittgenstein on May 16, he had demanded, via Moore, that Ambros…