English philosophers thought they had sloughed off the dead weight of history, but history suggests otherwise

• Krishnan is interested not only in “what people thought but what they were like”.
• The two questions are not as separate as many assume: a penetrating portrait of a philosopher can do much to illuminate their thought.
• Review: A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60 – Nikhil Krishnan (Profile Books) The range of thinkers surveyed is quite broad.
• Prichard, developments accelerated with the arrival of a younger generation increasingly interested in philosophical developments elsewhere, particularly Cambridge and Vienna.

Slaying the Hegelian dragon

• Moore, whose example brought on a spate of conversions at the turn of the century.
• His colleague Bertrand Russell wrote:
  It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel.
• It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel.
• Both Russell and Moore had been under the spell of the Hegelian philosopher J.M.E.
• Their apostasy is a central origin story of analytic philosophy: slaying the Hegelian dragon and sloughing off the dead weight of history.

Plain common sense

• The intellectual sobriety, the return from the spiritual heights, was admired as a gritty, secure way forward.
• Though it took some time to spread, this sensibility would eventually breach the “dreaming spires” of Oxford.
• Austin, who is given the most space of any thinker in Krishnan’s history, declared “Moore’s my man”.
• Rather than deferring to common sense, Austin directs our attention to common language.
• Moore’s influence was exerted through his personal example, but also through his editorship of the premier philosophy journal Mind.

Accents of infallibility

• He would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible.
• He would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible.
• very quiet and if possible ironical or at any rate unexcited and unrhetorical […] Austin carried this to an extreme.
• To chasten, to subdue, to silence were among the many things Austin knew how to do with words.

The Austinian superego

• But he also makes it clear that this was only so long as everyone agreed with Austin.
• One participant said of these Saturday meetings that “it was always just a little as if the headmaster were present”.
• To say that Austin “really should have been better at conceding a point” is a mild censure.
• His method of rule was that of the manager, rather than the magus or maestro.
• Krishnan never contrasts Austin’s philosophical views with Wittgenstein’s in any detail, but he does frequently contrast their manner of teaching.
• This is a little facile, and contradicted by Krishnan’s claim that “an entire generation of philosophers spoke in [Austin’s] voice”.
• Yet the quality of Berlin’s thought is obvious, even if it is difficult to say exactly what he was first-rate at.

A historical turn

• Similarly, Krishnan struggles to see the philosophical appeal of Berlin – a thinker whose style of speech he describes as “allusive and incontinent”.
• Krishnan is right when he says that how people react to a thinker “mark[s] a deep difference between temperaments”.
• But it is complacent to present the difference here as between those seduced by “rhetoric” and those unimpressed with the arguments.
• Each member of this group was to some extent influenced by Collingwood, another Oxford thinker given short shrift by Krishnan.
• From my own experience, a historical interest continues to be regarded by most professional philosophers as somewhere between a tolerably mild eccentricity and an unhealthy diversion.