Fabio asked:

Do you know Norman Malcolm? I need information about this philosopher. Thanks!

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Norman Malcolm was born in 1911 and died in 1990. He worked at Cornell University in New York
State for several decades before retiring in 1978, after which he moved to King's College London. He
was one of the master pupils of Wittgenstein and perhaps the chief transmitter of his ideas to the
United States in the 1940s and 1950s. His main work was in philosophy of mind and in the theory of
knowledge, where he opposed Cartesian and scientistic views by means of Wittgensteinian
conceptual analysis. What is perhaps his best-known book, Dreaming(1959), is a critique of
Descartes's argument from illusion, arguing that dreams cannot be coherently be viewed as mental
impressions occurring in sleep (what they actually are, he didn't claim to be able to say). As an
interpreter of Wittgenstein, Malcolm advanced the currently widely disputed view that Wittgenstein's
early work consists of straightforward metaphysical theses in the classic tradition of Western
philosophy which his later work is largely devoted to attacking, instead of already being an early
version of such an attack on the tradition.

T. P. Uschanov

Research Assistant

Department of Philosophy

University of Helsinki

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