1. If I were required, quite unreasonably, to say in a few sentences what I had learned from Peter Winch, I would, perhaps, begin my answer with the words: a certain way of reading Wittgenstein. Winch explored ideas encapsulated in remarks such as ‘In the beginning was the deed’ and ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul’ in a richer and more illuminating way than has any other philosopher, and I include in the phrase ‘any other philosopher’ Wittgenstein himself. For Winch developed these strands in Wittgenstein's thinking in a way that brings out the ethical involvement, at the most fundamental level, of areas of our thought that philosophers have traditionally discussed in complete abstraction from that dimension. The idea that we can ‘do the metaphysics first and deal with later, or leave to others, the ethics’ is one that still dominates English-language philosophy: to its great impoverishment. I, for one, am enormously indebted to Peter Winch for his showing another way of doing philosophy: a way that restores to philosophy a kind of importance that it has lost in the hands of many contemporary philosophers.

The way in which, in Winch's work, ethical considerations lie at the heart of philosophy is inseparable from the place that he gives to the idea that ‘In the beginning was the deed’. But there are, I think, potential confusions lurking here. I will not be particularly concerned with the question of whether the confusions are Wittgenstein’s, Winch's or simply some (at least one!) of Winch's readers. But I do want to suggest that confusions here may contribute to a sense that we have a clear understanding of the distinction between ‘philosophical’ and other forms of discussion. That sense is, I believe, reflected in the confidence of Winch's judgement in his paper ‘Moral Integrity’ that ‘philosophy can no more show a man what he should attach importance to than geometry can show a man where he should stand’. The confusions also, I will suggest, contribute to the pressure many have felt towards idealism, or towards seeing idealist tendencies in Wittgenstein. I will begin with the latter point: noting ways in which an emphasis on the primacy of action may generate idealist pressures. I will return, towards the end of my essay, to the former point.