Peter Winch

Peter Guy Winch (14 January 1926, London – 27 April 1997, Champaign, Illinois) was a British philosopher known for his contributions to the philosophy of social science, Wittgenstein scholarship, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Winch is perhaps most famous for his early book, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), an attack on positivism in the social sciences, drawing on the work of R. G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

Winch was born on 14 January 1926, in Walthamstow, London. He attended Leyton County High School for boys, before going up St Edmund Hall, Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Following the outbreak of World War II, he served in the Royal Navy 1944–47, before graduating from the University of Oxford in 1949.

He was a lecturer in philosophy at the Swansea University from 1951 until 1964. He was influenced by his colleagues Rush Rhees and Roy Holland, both experts in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1964, he moved to Birkbeck College, University of London, before becoming Professor of Philosophy at King's College London in 1967. During this period, he served as president of Aristotelian Society, from 1980 to 1981. In 1985 Winch moved to the United States to become Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.