Wisdom was educated at Aldeburgh Lodge School, Suffolk, and Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class BA degree in Moral Sciences in 1924.
Phillips writes that "No one among contemporary philosophers has done more than Wisdom to show us that religious beliefs are not experimental hypotheses about the world".
A Festschrift titled Wisdom: Twelve Essays (1974), edited by Renford Bambrough, was published near the time of his retirement from the same.
The first recorded use of the term "analytic philosophers" occurred in Wisdom's 1931 work, "Interpretation and Analysis in Relation to Bentham's Theory of Definition", which expounded on Bentham's concept of "paraphrasis": "that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity".
According to Michael Beaney, "the explicit articulation of the idea of paraphrasis in the work of both Wisdom in Cambridge and Ryle in Oxford represents a definite stage in the construction of analytic philosophy as a tradition".