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A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960
A lively, immersive account of the colorful and brilliant philosophers who roamed the halls of mid-twentieth-century Oxford and taught the world the importance of language
"This is Oxford philosophy in the round. The philosophical arguments, the personal lives, the colorful quotes, the elbow patches and buttered crumpets-brilliantly written."-James Franklin, author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia
What are the limits of language? How can philosophy be brought closer to everyday life? What is a good human being?
These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience.
A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of some of Oxford's most innovative thinkers. Far from being stuck in their ivory towers, the Oxford philosophers lived. They were codebreakers, diplomats, and soldiers in both World Wars, and they often drew on their real-world experience in creating their greatest works, masterpieces of British modernism original in both thought and style.
Steeped in the dramatic history of the twentieth century, A Terribly Serious Adventure is an eye-opening look inside the rooms that changed how we think about our world. Shedding light on the lives and intellectual achievements of a large and spirited cast of characters, Cambridge academic Nikhil Krishnan shows us how much we can still learn from the Oxford philosophers. In our fractious, post-truth world, their acute sense of responsibility for their words, their passionate desire to get the little things right, stands as an inspiring example.
"This is Oxford philosophy in the round. The philosophical arguments, the personal lives, the colorful quotes, the elbow patches and buttered crumpets-brilliantly written."-James Franklin, author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia
What are the limits of language? How can philosophy be brought closer to everyday life? What is a good human being?
These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience.
A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of some of Oxford's most innovative thinkers. Far from being stuck in their ivory towers, the Oxford philosophers lived. They were codebreakers, diplomats, and soldiers in both World Wars, and they often drew on their real-world experience in creating their greatest works, masterpieces of British modernism original in both thought and style.
Steeped in the dramatic history of the twentieth century, A Terribly Serious Adventure is an eye-opening look inside the rooms that changed how we think about our world. Shedding light on the lives and intellectual achievements of a large and spirited cast of characters, Cambridge academic Nikhil Krishnan shows us how much we can still learn from the Oxford philosophers. In our fractious, post-truth world, their acute sense of responsibility for their words, their passionate desire to get the little things right, stands as an inspiring example.
Editorial Reviews
"Spirited [and] frequently wry . . . an account of thought at Oxford from 1900 to 1960 that weaves biography with philosophy and somehow attains . . . a pellucid clarity. This is one of those books that leaves readers feeling a lot cleverer than they actually are."-The Sunday Telegraph
"[A] terrific new book [that] tells the story of the heyday of linguistic philosophy."-The Spectator
"All of the philosophers [that A Terribly Serious Adventure] discusses are dead, but I knew most of them personally, and some of them were good friends. Relying on memoirs and other sources, [Nikhil] Krishnan has succeeded in bringing these men and women and their complex and intense relations to life-which is a real achievement."-Thomas Nagel, The New Statesman
"A valuable contribution [that] offer[s] a much richer understanding of Oxford philosophy."-Oxford Political Review
"The slice of the story Krishnan tells (rivetingly, and in what prose!) centers on the developments at Oxford from 1900-1960. . . . [But] what Krishnan has really given us . . . isn't only a history. It is a love letter, written by someone who knows what it means to fall in love with philosophy."-The Critic
"A Terribly Serious Adventure beautifully portrays-and exemplifies-the combined wit and profundity, exuberance and rigor, of Oxford analytic philosophy."-Times Literary Supplement
"This is Oxford philosophy in the round-the philosophical arguments (clearly explained), the personal lives, the colorful quotes, the elbow patches and buttered crumpets. . . . Brilliantly written."-James Franklin, author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia
"We are given first-row seats to the brilliance, obstinacy, jousting, and intellectual enthusiasms that marked that legendary academic circle."-David I. Kertzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Pope at War
"[A] terrific new book [that] tells the story of the heyday of linguistic philosophy."-The Spectator
"All of the philosophers [that A Terribly Serious Adventure] discusses are dead, but I knew most of them personally, and some of them were good friends. Relying on memoirs and other sources, [Nikhil] Krishnan has succeeded in bringing these men and women and their complex and intense relations to life-which is a real achievement."-Thomas Nagel, The New Statesman
"A valuable contribution [that] offer[s] a much richer understanding of Oxford philosophy."-Oxford Political Review
"The slice of the story Krishnan tells (rivetingly, and in what prose!) centers on the developments at Oxford from 1900-1960. . . . [But] what Krishnan has really given us . . . isn't only a history. It is a love letter, written by someone who knows what it means to fall in love with philosophy."-The Critic
"A Terribly Serious Adventure beautifully portrays-and exemplifies-the combined wit and profundity, exuberance and rigor, of Oxford analytic philosophy."-Times Literary Supplement
"This is Oxford philosophy in the round-the philosophical arguments (clearly explained), the personal lives, the colorful quotes, the elbow patches and buttered crumpets. . . . Brilliantly written."-James Franklin, author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia
"We are given first-row seats to the brilliance, obstinacy, jousting, and intellectual enthusiasms that marked that legendary academic circle."-David I. Kertzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Pope at War
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
Fog
Gilbert Ryle (b.1900), the first-born of the protagonists of this story, grew up in Sussex, sunniest of English counties. In later life, he told a sort of origin story for himself. A bright young schoolmaster at young Ryle's school, just "down from Oxford," asked his class the kind of question Socrates would have relished: "What is color?" "Paint," replied one unassuming lad. Ryle smirked knowingly. Asked if he could do better, he said something to the effect that a color is the power of an object to produce a certain kind of sensation in us. It was what, a few years later, he knew to call "a Lockean sort of answer." "I scored five marks for my sapience," the grown-up know-it-all recalled in his memoir.
Ryle belonged to a generation of men who had just started to call each other by their Christian names, but he was inconsistent on the matter. We had better play it safe and call him "Ryle." His grandfather was the first bishop of Liverpool, and the author of a steady stream of readable theological treatises with titles like Knots Untied. Old Bishop Ryle sought salvation in the Word of God, "the Word made clear to the head and applied to the heart." Woolliness was the chief instrument of the devil, his way of dividing Christian from Christian; God's work called for his servants to do better. "If men would only define with precision the theological terms which they use, many disputes would die. Scores of excited disputants would discover . . . that their disputes have arisen from their own neglect of the great duty of explaining the meaning of words."
He managed to raise an agnostic son-Gilbert's father-who became a prosperous general practitioner with a sideline in philosophical speculation; he was one of the early members of the Aristotelian Society. His own ten children, clever and variously gifted, never had a faith to lose. Gilbert Ryle repudiated the evangelical inheritance but imbibed the family manner and always wrote in the punchy style of his grandfather.
He was born in the late summer of 1900, a lucky year to be born an English boy. Just a year older and there was every chance that he would have been one of the 149 boys from Brighton College who died at Ypres, in the Somme or in Palestine, and whose deaths were announced at school assembly. As it was, Ryle survived, eighteen years old at the Armistice, and ready to head for-or "go up to"-Oxford, armed with the confidence of a happy childhood spent under a Brighton sun.
His Oxford college was Queen's, on the High Street, dubbed by Pevsner "the grandest piece of classical architecture in Oxford," a product of "the short phase which one has a right to name English Baroque, i.e. Baroque with English reservations." A surviving photograph of Ryle in his twenties could be that of an officer on leave, or a young schoolmaster capable of going from joshing to sternness in a blink. His jaw is set, his eyes hardened; the high forehead portends the baldness of middle age. The one decorative touch is the wet gloss of the Macassar oil holding his immaculate side parting in place.
The degree for which he was "reading" was Literae Humaniores, with its two phases, "Moderations" and "Greats." Mods-Oxford leaves nothing serious without a nickname-ended with a grueling set of exams, two a day on average, in Greek and Latin language and literature. It has been said that only the ten-day ordeal that is the Chinese civil service entrance exam is harder. Ryle was halfhearted for those first five terms, a succession of eight intense weeks punctuated with long vacations. He achieved distinction as a rower, rising, as he later put it, "to the giddy height of Captain of Boats." But he found also that he "lacked the ear, the nostrils, the palate, and the toe" of the real classical scholar. It didn't stop him getting a first-class degree anyway, in the only way one is supposed to get a first at Oxford: without trying.
Ryle's one early classical love was Aristophanes, whose bawdy plays spared no one but were especially rude about philosophers. (Socrates in The Clouds is mostly interested in examining the rear end of a gnat.) His other early love was logic, "a grown-up subject, in which there were still unsolved problems." "Unsolved" meant, among other things, that the only advantage the old had over the young was that of having had longer to think about the questions.
Greats was a peculiar and somewhat unsystematic coupling of history (ancient Greek and Roman) with philosophy (ancient and modern). Ryle "did think that the Academy mattered more than the Peloponnesian War"-the Academy in question being Plato's original-but was left cold by his tutors' attitude to the Republic. They treated it, he recalled, "like the Bible, ...
Fog
Gilbert Ryle (b.1900), the first-born of the protagonists of this story, grew up in Sussex, sunniest of English counties. In later life, he told a sort of origin story for himself. A bright young schoolmaster at young Ryle's school, just "down from Oxford," asked his class the kind of question Socrates would have relished: "What is color?" "Paint," replied one unassuming lad. Ryle smirked knowingly. Asked if he could do better, he said something to the effect that a color is the power of an object to produce a certain kind of sensation in us. It was what, a few years later, he knew to call "a Lockean sort of answer." "I scored five marks for my sapience," the grown-up know-it-all recalled in his memoir.
Ryle belonged to a generation of men who had just started to call each other by their Christian names, but he was inconsistent on the matter. We had better play it safe and call him "Ryle." His grandfather was the first bishop of Liverpool, and the author of a steady stream of readable theological treatises with titles like Knots Untied. Old Bishop Ryle sought salvation in the Word of God, "the Word made clear to the head and applied to the heart." Woolliness was the chief instrument of the devil, his way of dividing Christian from Christian; God's work called for his servants to do better. "If men would only define with precision the theological terms which they use, many disputes would die. Scores of excited disputants would discover . . . that their disputes have arisen from their own neglect of the great duty of explaining the meaning of words."
He managed to raise an agnostic son-Gilbert's father-who became a prosperous general practitioner with a sideline in philosophical speculation; he was one of the early members of the Aristotelian Society. His own ten children, clever and variously gifted, never had a faith to lose. Gilbert Ryle repudiated the evangelical inheritance but imbibed the family manner and always wrote in the punchy style of his grandfather.
He was born in the late summer of 1900, a lucky year to be born an English boy. Just a year older and there was every chance that he would have been one of the 149 boys from Brighton College who died at Ypres, in the Somme or in Palestine, and whose deaths were announced at school assembly. As it was, Ryle survived, eighteen years old at the Armistice, and ready to head for-or "go up to"-Oxford, armed with the confidence of a happy childhood spent under a Brighton sun.
His Oxford college was Queen's, on the High Street, dubbed by Pevsner "the grandest piece of classical architecture in Oxford," a product of "the short phase which one has a right to name English Baroque, i.e. Baroque with English reservations." A surviving photograph of Ryle in his twenties could be that of an officer on leave, or a young schoolmaster capable of going from joshing to sternness in a blink. His jaw is set, his eyes hardened; the high forehead portends the baldness of middle age. The one decorative touch is the wet gloss of the Macassar oil holding his immaculate side parting in place.
The degree for which he was "reading" was Literae Humaniores, with its two phases, "Moderations" and "Greats." Mods-Oxford leaves nothing serious without a nickname-ended with a grueling set of exams, two a day on average, in Greek and Latin language and literature. It has been said that only the ten-day ordeal that is the Chinese civil service entrance exam is harder. Ryle was halfhearted for those first five terms, a succession of eight intense weeks punctuated with long vacations. He achieved distinction as a rower, rising, as he later put it, "to the giddy height of Captain of Boats." But he found also that he "lacked the ear, the nostrils, the palate, and the toe" of the real classical scholar. It didn't stop him getting a first-class degree anyway, in the only way one is supposed to get a first at Oxford: without trying.
Ryle's one early classical love was Aristophanes, whose bawdy plays spared no one but were especially rude about philosophers. (Socrates in The Clouds is mostly interested in examining the rear end of a gnat.) His other early love was logic, "a grown-up subject, in which there were still unsolved problems." "Unsolved" meant, among other things, that the only advantage the old had over the young was that of having had longer to think about the questions.
Greats was a peculiar and somewhat unsystematic coupling of history (ancient Greek and Roman) with philosophy (ancient and modern). Ryle "did think that the Academy mattered more than the Peloponnesian War"-the Academy in question being Plato's original-but was left cold by his tutors' attitude to the Republic. They treated it, he recalled, "like the Bible, ...
