Major influences upon Winch include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees, R. G. Collingwood and Simone Weil. He gave rise to a form of philosophy that has been given the name 'sociologism'. He also bears responsibility for a small school of sociology that was prepared to accept his radical criticism of the subject. Winch saw himself as an uncompromising Wittgensteinian. He was not personally acquainted with Wittgenstein; Wittgenstein's influence upon him was mostly mediated through that of Rush Rhees, who was his colleague at the University College of Swansea, now known as Swansea University, and whom Wittgenstein appointed as one of his literary executors. Winch's translation of Wittgenstein's Vermischte Bemerkungen was published in 1980 as Culture and Value. After the death of Rhees in 1989, Winch took over his position as literary executor. From Rush Rhees, Winch derived his interest in the religious writer Simone Weil. Part of the appeal was a break from Wittgenstein into a very different type of philosophy which could nevertheless be tackled with familiar methods. Also Weil's ascetic, somewhat Tolstoyan, form of religion harmonised with one aspect of Wittgenstein's personality. At a time when most Anglo-American philosophers were heavily under the spell of Wittgenstein, Winch's own approach was strikingly original. While much of his work was concerned with rescuing Wittgenstein from what he took to be misreadings, his own philosophy involved a shift of emphasis from the problems that preoccupied Oxford style ‘linguistic’ philosophy, towards justifying and explaining 'forms of life' in terms of consistent language games. He took Wittgensteinian philosophy into areas of ethics and religion, which Wittgenstein himself had relatively neglected, sometimes showing considerable originality. An example is his illuminating treatment of the moral difference between someone who tries and fails to commit murder and someone who succeeds, in his essay "Trying" in Ethics and Action. With the decline of interest in Wittgenstein, Winch himself was increasingly neglected and the challenge his arguments presented to much contemporary philosophy was sidestepped or ignored. In insisting on the continuity of Wittgenstein's concerns from the Tractatus through to the Philosophical Investigations, Winch made a powerful case for Wittgenstein's mature philosophy, as he understood it, as the consummation and legitimate heir of the entire analytic tradition. Wittgenstein famously said that philosophy leaves the world as it is. Winch takes his ideas into regions that have strong moral and political implications.
