A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960 by Nikhil Krishnan is a history of a way of doing philosophy that was admired by some, reviled by others, and unnoticed by 99.9% of the population.(1) If you know who J L Austin, Gilbert Ryle and Philippa Foot are, you will probably find this a page-turner. If you don’t, and you embark on it, you may wonder
who are these people, and how did they get there?
The academic world, especially at Oxford, was very different in the first half of the twentieth century. An undergraduate who passed the legendary Greats examination in Greek and Roman history, philosophy and literature with a first-class honours, who also made a good impression on their tutors, and was prepared to live the life academic, could more or less walk into a job at a university somewhere, the very best getting a Fellowship in one of the Oxford colleges. Tenure at twenty-three, no PhD’s, no post-doc hell, no publication record, no pressure to publish anything, and no enormous student debt. Different days.
The people in this story were
very clever boys and girls who could (usually) learn foreign languages quickly, construct arguments in the approved style, and were good “exam-passers”. They had no maths and less science, but many were more familiar with exotic European philosophers than their writing would suggest. Many of the earlier generation served in one back-room way or another in various parts of the Armed Forces during WW2 - J L Austin was in charge of intelligence about the German Army for D-Day - but afterwards made very little of it, partly because they were sworn to secrecy. (I have long suspected that some philosophers got their jobs as a reward for their war work - especially those at Bletchley.)
“Oxford Philosophy” was not influential because it was important
philosophy, it was influential because it was philosophy from
Oxford. It is almost impossible to appreciate how insular mainstream culture was in the UK in much of the twentieth century. It was dominated by a handful of institutions: Oxbridge and their university presses, the BBC, a handful of publishing houses,
The Times,
The Times Literary Supplement, the Royal Ballet and Opera, the RSC, and a few more. What mattered was whether one held a position within these institutions, or were backed by those who did. Back then, the appointments were made on the basis of how a bunch of chaps felt about the candidates. The outside world would see that Oxford had appointed the man, and assume he was something special, because they believed Oxford was something special. Though he might have little originality or ability, on appointment to some venerable Chair, he would find his reputation back-filled and bolstered to match the status of the position.
The “Oxford Philosophers” were not mainstream cultural figures - except A J Ayer whose
Language, Truth and Logic is still in print and selling, and Iris Murdoch, who became a well-known novelist. Otherwise a well-educated electrical engineer would have had no idea who Gilbert Ryle, J L Austin, Peter Strawson, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and others were, let alone have read the few things they published in their lifetimes.
So what was the fuss about? Ostensibly, it was the proper techniques for “doing philosophy”. The Oxford Philosophers claimed that many of the questions and confusions in philosophy could be “cleared up” by paying careful attention to the concepts involved. The same view was pushed by Wittgenstein at Cambridge, and by the Vienna Circle and its associates. It wasn’t the thesis that was objectionable: it was the method. This made two claims. The first was that careful attention to our everyday language would show that the philosophical problem was really a kind of confusion or mis-understanding.
On this, nobody will deny it is always useful to start any discussion of a concept by checking the dictionary and Wikipedia, to make sure that other people will be thinking about the same thing we are when the hear the words we use. From there, it helps to have a few paradigmatic examples of the concept at work, with some compare-and-contrast to locate it in the conceptual landscape. If there is a group of people making money in some way from the concept, we need to understand who they are and what they are being paid to provide. If there is legislation that uses the concept, we need a glance at that. If it has a history, it might help to read that. If the concept has a technical use in a science, we need to decide how to treat that. If it is being wielded by activists, we need to be aware of that, if only to avoid being distracted by their controversies. Is the concept unique to our native language, or does it have equivalents in other languages, and if it doesn’t, how do they manage without it?
But this is not what the Oxford philosophers meant. Their second claim was that ordinary language, as spoken by the kind of people who get a First in Greats, contains all the concepts and distinctions we need to clear up the confusion. There was no need for appeal to scientific theories, because there were no empirical claims involved in defining the distinctions and concepts. And there was no need for philosophical theories, because, well, all we need are ordinary-language ideas, which are held to be a-theoretical. (Nobody said that last bit out loud, even though the idea that language provides and constrains our conceptual resources, and hence, amongst other things, our ability to make distinctions and analyses, had been around for at least eighty years.)
This, combined with what many felt was a smug and parochial tone, was the reason many other philosophers felt Oxford Philosophy trivialised philosophy. It wasn’t that the Oxford people were
wrong, it was that they were
shallow. Iris Murdoch said in a review of Ryle’s
The Concept of Mind
[It] evokes a picture of a world in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party.
Murdoch’s point is that the force of Ryle’s arguments depend in part on the blandness of the examples. We might be willing to make a distinction between this and that when applied to frying an egg, but not when applied to spray-painting shop windows in protest. Nuances that can be heard when the moral volume is low, are lost when the moral volume is turned up, and other sounds become audible. We can accept Ryle’s arguments, but feel that, somehow, the conclusions have a very limited application in our coarser, more chaotic, lives. (Krishnan makes the point that an adequate philosophy must apply to lives in which we both play cricket and commit sins, cook cakes and fall in love, remember our childhoods and say prayers, and go to the circus while members of the Communist Party.)
It was not and still is not my preferred way of doing philosophy. Detailed, tortuous arguments picking apart (as it might be) Jones’ view of Smith’s account of excuses and reasons, leave me feeling uninformed and slightly dizzy. I don’t
care that Jones’ views are full of holes, and Smith’s aren’t much better. I want an account of excuses and reasons that learns from the mistakes of those who came earlier, and doesn’t show off its erudition by burdening me with a list of those mistakes and why each is wrong. Unfortunately, it was the preferred way of doing philosophy at the university where I was an undergraduate: I barely survived long enough to make it to the LSE.
The results of an ordinary-language analysis, of some concept being grossly abused by a (as it might be) psychologist in their pop-science book, can be useful for dispelling the confusion and wrong conclusions created by the abuse.
But the results must be used in passing, as simple facts, and their source never mentioned, for fear of boring or puzzling the reader. Ordinary language analysis is one of many items in the philosopher’s tool-belt, to be used when appropriate. One should never display one’s philosophical tricks and techniques. Nobody is interested. They want to know about the subject.
In the end, that might have been the reason Oxford Philosophy attracted so much hostility. It was too much about itself, as the work of very clever people can be, its topics chosen not because they were interesting to us, but because they showed off the method and the cleverness.
(1) The population of the UK was about 55m at the time. 0.1% of that would 55,000 people, and that’s an overestimate. Don’t forget there were only around 30 universities in the UK back then. At 40 people per year doing philosophy (about the size of my undergrad class) over 30 years, that’s 36,000 students, plus (say) 500 lecturers and professors.
