Yorick Smythies

Yorick Smythies (21 February 1917 – 2 October 1980) was a student and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein known for his notes of the philosopher's lectures. He was also a friend of, and character inspiration for, the novelist (and philosopher) Iris Murdoch.

Life Childhood Yorick Smythies was born on 21 February 1917 in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight where Yorick's maternal grandparents were living at the time. Yorick was the first child of Kate Marjorie "Joe" Smythies née Gouldsmith, and Cmdr Bernard Edward Smythies DFC who had been born in 1886 in Dehradun, India. Bernard, the younger brother of E. A. Smythies and elder brother of Richard Dawkins' paternal grandmother Enid, was a decorated RAF pilot who was killed in a flying accident at North Weald Airfield on 17 June 1930. As well as being survived by his wife, son, and brother, Bernard "Bunny" Smythies would be survived by his father Arthur Smythies (1847- 1934) and by his daughter, Yorick's younger sister. Yorick was educated at Harrow.

University Smythies began the Moral Sciences Tripos at King's College, Cambridge in 1935, graduating with a First in philosophy in 1939. Smythies also attended Wittgenstein's lectures in the academic year 1935/36 but (Wittgenstein not normally allowing students to take them in class) his notes of those lectures are sketchy. He returned in early 1938 and Smythies began to take more detailed notes of his lectures from that year. his notes became key sources for the reconstruction of Wittgenstein's lectures. During his lifetime, some of Smythies' notes were incorporated into Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (1966) and Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (1976) both being works edited by others. Further notes of Wittgenstein's lectures taken by Smythies were published in 1988 as Lectures on Freedom of the Will.

In early 1940 Smythies filed for a military exemption as a conscientious objector, with Wittgenstein writing a letter on his behalf. He received a full exemption and during the war would work for the Nullfield College Social Reconstruction Survey, beginning in 1942. He served as a field officer that evaluated the economic prospects of regions in light of the war. In 1943, after the survey came to an end, he got a job at the Barnett House Library in Oxford with a recommendation from Wittgenstein.

Smythies delivered talks to the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, and taught philosophy part-time at Oxford in 1944 (on the philosophy of George Berkeley). And, indeed, though Smythies did go on to teach philosophy for Oxford's Advanced Student Summer Courses between 1955 and 1957, he never became a professional lecturer and worked mainly as a librarian (latterly at the department of social studies at the University of Oxford). Wittgenstein told Smythies he had read the review, writing "and it isn’t bad."

Religion Like G.E.M. Anscombe, Smythies was a convert to Catholicism. and said "I could not possibly bring myself to believe all the things that they believe." Wittgenstein reported, to Maurice Drury, that he felt partly responsible for Smythies' religious conversion because he had advised Smythies to read Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein wrote to Smythies in 1944 thus:Deciding to become a Christian is like deciding to give up walking on the ground and do tight-rope walking instead, where nothing is more easy than to slip and every slip can be fatal. … I cannot applaud your decision to go in for rope walking, because I have always stayed on the ground myself, I have no right to encourage another man in such an enterprise. … I’m really interested in what sort of a man you are and will be. This will, for me, be the eating of the pudding. (repeated by Peter J. Conradi ) that Smythies suffered from (paranoid) schizophrenia is disputed by Volker A. Munz. Neither Monk nor Munz offer any explanation for why Smythies might been thought to suffer from this condition, nor, accordingly, does Munz offer any alternative diagnosis. Conradi however identifies a "schizophrenic breakdown" as the cause of Yorick 'hiding behind trees' and "making strange utterances" and mentions time spent by him in a mental hospital. According to Frank Cioffi, Smythies consulted the psychiatrist Maurice O'Connor Drury about his "schizophrenic episodes".

Marriages Smythies married his first wife Diana Pollard Diana was the daughter of the British Intelligence officer Hugh Pollard and had, aged eighteen, accompanied her father in posing as tourists to 'camouflage' the covert flight from England that collected General Franco from his 'semi-banishment' in the Canary Islands and took him to Spanish Morocco in 1936. The marriage would end in divorce but Diana continued to live in North Oxford until her death in 2003. having lived latterly in Amberley, Gloucestershire, near Stroud.

Death Volker A. Munz, insists, contrary to the claims of Ray Monk,

In literature Smythies was the basis for the character Hugo Belfounder in the novel Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch.

After Smythies died in 1980 Murdoch wrote mention of the character's death into her novel The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) which she was then composing.