1. Yorick Smythies was a student and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein known for his notes of the philosopher's lectures.
17 Facts About Yorick Smythies
1. 2.
Yorick Smythies was a friend of, and character inspiration for, the novelist Iris Murdoch.
3.
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.
4.
Yorick was the first child of Kate Marjorie "Joe" Smythies nee Gouldsmith, and Cmdr Bernard Edward Smythies DFC who had been born in 1886 in Dehradun, India.
5.
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.
6.
Yorick Smythies attended, and took detailed notes of, Max Newman's 1935 lecture course on logic.
7.
Yorick Smythies returned in early 1938 and Smythies began to take more detailed notes of his lectures from that year.
8.
However, a large body of notes, mostly from the period 1938 to 1940, which Smythies called the Whewell's Court Lectures were only published in 2017 under the editorship of Volker A Munz and his assistant Bernhard Ritter.
9.
Yorick Smythies delivered talks to the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, and taught philosophy part-time at Oxford in 1944.
10.
Ray Monk's claim that Smythies suffered from schizophrenia is disputed by Volker A Munz.
11.
Conradi however identifies a "schizophrenic breakdown" as the cause of Yorick Smythies 'hiding behind trees' and "making strange utterances" and mentions time spent by him in a mental hospital.
12.
An explanation is offered by Yorick's first cousin, the neuropsychiatrist JR Smythies who, disputing Monk's claims of schizophrenia, claimed that, prescribed amphetamines for depression, Yorick Smythies became dependent on them and subsequently developed a "wholly iatrogenic" chronic paranoid amphetamine psychosis.
13.
Yorick Smythies married his first wife Diana Pollard in 1944, in Oxford.
14.
In 1974 Smythies married his second wife, Margaret 'Peg' Smythies nee Britton by whom Yorick had already had a son Daniel in 1963.
15.
Peg would survive Yorick Smythies and go on to marry another friend and former student of Wittgenstein, the philosopher Rush Rhees.
16.
Yorick Smythies was the basis for the character Hugo Belfounder in the novel Under the Net by Iris Murdoch.
17.
When Yorick Smythies died in 1980 Murdoch wrote the character's death into her novel The Philosopher's Pupil which she was then composing.