User:Erinkluge/Alice Ambrose

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Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz (November 25, 1906 – January 25, 2001) was an American philosopher, logician, professor, and author.

Early Life and Education[edit]
Alice Loman Ambrose was born in Lexington, Illinois and orphaned when she was 13 years old. She studied philosophy and mathematics at Millikin University (1924–28). She completed her MA in 1929 and her first Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Ambrose's dissertation was titled In defense of an existential logic. During her time at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ambrose's most Influential teachers were Evander Bradley McGilvary and Frank Chapman Sharp. In 1932 she went to Cambridge University,Newnham College to study with G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, where she earned a second PhD in 1938. Ambrose dedicated her section of an academic journal Teaching Philosophy, Volume 12, Issue 2 (1989) to Moore and Wittgenstein. She described them as two most very different teachers that she could have imagined.

Wittgenstein[edit]
Having become a close student of Wittgenstein, Ambrose later related her association with him in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language (1972), a volume co-edited with her husband Morris Lazerowitz. Along with fellow student Margaret MacDonald she secretly (Since Wittgenstein did not allow this) made notes during Wittgenstein's lectures. After persuading Wittgenstein, Ambrose and MacDonald's notes were published with his permission. She was one of a select group of students to whom Wittgenstein dictated the so-called Blue and Brown Books, which outline the transition in Wittgenstein's thought between his two major works, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein terminated their association abruptly in 1935, when Ambrose decided, with encouragement from G.E. Moore, to publish an article entitled "Finitism in Mathematics" in the philosophical journal Mind which was intended to give an account of Wittgenstein's position on the subject.

Philosophical Work
Despite being known mostly for her collaborations with Wittgenstein and Moore, Ambrose made notable contributions to the field of early analytic philosophy. In "The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy", Ambrose argued that all languages suffer from vagueness, and that this cannot be fixed by replacing natural languages with artificial ones, since a new artificial language must be stated and explained in terms of the older natural language. In "Linguistic Approaches to Philosophical Problems", Ambrose argued that philosophical theories do not give information about the world, but instead should be understood as (often unconscious) linguistic proposals to change the meaning or use of our words, for philosophical purposes.

Career[edit]
Ambrose began her career at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as an Instructor of Philosophy from 1935 till 1937 when she returned to the United States in 1935. She then took a position in Smith College in 1937, where she remained for the rest of her career. She was awarded the Austin and Sophia Smith chair in Philosophy in 1964 and became Professor Emeritus in 1972. Between 1953 and 1968, she was editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. She worked chiefly in logic and mathematical philosophy, writing a primer on the subject with her husband which became a widely used textbook and was known as "Ambrose and Lazerowitz". She collaborated with her husband on a number of works: Fundamentals of Symbolic Logic (1948), Logic: The Theory of Formal Inference (1961), Philosophical Theories (1976) and Essays in the Unknown Wittgenstein (1984). Even after her retirement she continued to teach and guest lecture at Smith, Hampshire College, the University of Delaware, and other universities around the U.S and Canada such as San Jose State College, Cornell University, University of Calgary until her death, at the age of 94, on January 25, 2001.

Her personal papers are held at Smith College Archives.

Publications[edit]

 * Ambrose, A. (1931). "A Critical Discussion of Mind and the World-Order". Journal of Philosophy 28/14: 365-381.
 * Ambrose, A. (1935). "Finitism in Mathematics [I]". Mind 44: 186-203
 * Ambrose, A. (1935). "Finitism in Mathematics [II]". Mind 44: 317-340
 * Ambrose, A. & M. Lazerowitz (1948). Fundamentals of Symbolic Logic. Rinehart.
 * Ambrose, A. & M. Lazerowitz, ed. (1948). Logic: The Theory of Formal Inference. Rinehart.
 * Ambrose, A. (1950). "The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy" Philosophical Analysis. 15-37
 * Ambrose A. (1952). "Linguistic Approaches to Philosophical Problems" The Journal of Philosophy 49: 289-301
 * Ambrose, A. (1966). Essays in Analysis. Allen & Unwin
 * Ambrose, A. (1966). "Wittgenstein on Universals" in W.E. Kennick and M.Lazerowitz (eds.) Metaphysics: Readings and Reappraisals, ch. 7
 * Ambrose, A. (1968). "The Revolution in Philosophy: from the Structure of the World to the Structure of Language" The Massachusetts Review 9/3: 551-564
 * Ambrose, A. & M. Lazerowitz, ed. (1970). G.E. Moore: essays in retrospect. Allen & Unwin
 * Ambrose, A. (1970). "Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Portrait" in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language, 13-25
 * Ambrose, A. & M Lazerowitz, ed. (1972). Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language. Allen & Unwin.
 * Ambrose, A. & M. Lazerowitz, ed. (1976). Philosophical Theories. Mouton de Gruyter.
 * Ambrose, A. & M. Lazerowitz, ed. (1984). Essays in the unknown Wittgenstein. Prometheus Books.
 * Ambrose, A. & M. Lazerowitz (1985). Necessity and language. Croom Helm.
 * Ambrose, Alice. (1989) "Moore and Wittgenstein as Teachers," Teaching Philosophy 12(2): 107-113
 * Alice Ambrose's Letters, held in Cambridge University Library (MA Add. 8330 8L/8)
 * Alice Ambrose's Papers, held in Newnham College Archives (PP Lazerowitz)