Rush Rhees is mostly known as the first trustee Wittgenstein appointed in his will. He was a controversial figure, it seems, as some found him to be a generous philosopher with a deep understanding of Wittgenstein’s thought, others again an arrogant and almost incompetent philosopher, jealously guarding Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and making a mess of the volumes he produced. Not surprisingly, this division of appreciation continued well after his death, and becomes visible if one considers the reception of Rhees’s own Nachlass. Leaving some 16.000 pages behind, hand-written notes as well as typed-up manuscripts and letters, it was something of an Augean Stable that his student D.Z. Phillips was left to clean up.

In this paper, I account for some of the challenges that Phillips faced when publishing the Nachlass, and discuss what this tells us about Rhees’s philosophy and its reception, and its relation to Wittgenstein's philosophy. The paper builds on archival research at Swansea University, more precisely on material from the Rush Rhees Collection and the D.Z. Phillips Collection. I shall focus on the following books by Rhees (compiled and edited by Phillips): Religion and Philosophy, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, and There - Like Our Life.