bound variable See ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT,. VARIABL. Bouwsma, O(ets) K(olk) (1898–1978), American philosopher, a practitioner of ordinary language philosophy and celebrated teacher. Through work on Moore and contact with students such as Norman Malcolm and Morris Lazerowitz, whom he sent from Nebraska to work with Moore, Bouwsma discovered Wittgenstein. He became known for conveying an understanding of Wittgenstein’s techniques of philosophical analysis through his own often humorous grasp of sense and nonsense. Focusing on a particular pivotal sentence in an argument, he provided imaginative surroundings for it, showing how, in the philosopher’s mouth, the sentence lacked sense. He sometimes described this as ‘the method of failure.’ In connection with Descartes’s evil genius, e.g., Bouwsma invents an elaborate story in which the evil genius tries but fails to permanently deceive by means of a totally paper world. Our inability to imagine such a deception undermines the sense of the evil genius argument. His writings are replete with similar stories, analogies, and teases of sense and nonsense for such philosophical standards as Berkeley’s idealism, Moore’s theory of sensedata, and Anselm’s ontological argument.
Bouwsma did not advocate theories nor put forward refutations of other philosophers’ views. His talent lay rather in exposing some central sentence in an argument as disguised nonsense. In this, he went beyond Wittgenstein, working out the details of the latter’s insights into language. In addition to this appropriation of Wittgenstein, Bouwsma also appropriated Kierkegaard, understanding him too as one who dispelled philosophical illusions – those arising from the attempt to understand Christianity. The ordinary language of religious philosophy was that of scriptures. He drew upon this language in his many essays on religious themes. His religious dimension made whole this person who gave no quarter to traditional metaphysics. His papers are published under the titles Philosophical Essays, Toward a New Sensibility, Without Proof or Evidence, and Wittgenstein Conversations 1949–51. His philosophical notebooks are housed at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.
See also ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSO- PHY , WITTGENSTEI. R.E.H.