Examined Life

Review of N. Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure

To those with no particular interest in philosophy, the phrase “Oxford philosophy” will mean very little. But among those who do care about philosophy, it conjures a distinct impression—one not unlike, perhaps, the impression that cocktails and jazz might have made on the young crowd at Woodstock in the late 1960s. In other words, Oxford philosophy is regarded as old, stuffy, long past its prime, and of little relevance to anything that matters today.

Oxford philosophy was one manifestation of the “linguistic turn” that swept through philosophy from the early twentieth century to the 1950s. In early twentieth-century Vienna, a group of intellectuals influenced by the physicist Ernst Mach began what would come to be remembered as one of the century’s most ambitious intellectual movements: logical positivism. They called themselves the Vienna Circle, and their ranks included not only philosophers but also scientists, logicians, mathematicians, and social scientists. Kurt Gödel, later famous for his incompleteness theorems, was a quiet member of the group.

One of their central aims was to purge philosophy of the metaphysical speculation that had dominated it for over two thousand years and to reduce it to a handmaiden of science. According to the positivist programme, the only route to meaningful knowledge of the world was through empirical science. Philosophy’s role was to analyse the propositions of science using the tools of formal logic, thereby clarifying their meaning, and to deploy those same tools to expose and eliminate the pseudo-propositions that philosophy had been churning out for millennia. Philosophers were no longer to ask “What is moral?” Such a question, lacking any truth-conditions, was a pseudo-question from the start. They were to ask instead “‘What does ‘moral’ mean?’” They were not to ask “What exists?” but rather “What can be said to ‘exist’?” Philosophy, once a discipline that inquired into the nature of existence and morality, shrank under the positivist scalpel into a linguistic-logical project concerned solely with what ‘existence’ and ‘morality’ mean. In this sense, the Vienna Circle held what might be called a deflationary view of philosophy.

The philosophical method of the Vienna Circle was received in quite different ways at Cambridge and Oxford. At Cambridge, the positivist approach was hardly alien. Bertrand Russell had already been carrying forward Gottlob Frege’s project of analysing—or reducing—the meaning of mathematical propositions through the apparatus of formal logic. Oxford, today’s protagonist, came to the new current a step later, absorbing it indirectly through Cambridge.

The first at Oxford to sense that something remarkable was afoot at Cambridge were Gilbert Ryle and A. J. Ayer. When Ryle arrived at Oxford, there were no young people. The First World War had swept them all to the front. Ryle had grown weary of the idealism-versus-realism debate presided over by the old guard—Bradley and Cook Wilson—and when he encountered the work of Moore and Russell at Cambridge, the new current seized him. Ayer, with Ryle’s encouragement, gained more direct exposure to logical positivism and went on to publish Language, Truth and Logic, a book that served as something of a manifesto for the movement and became the bridge between the Vienna Circle and the English-speaking world.

Yet despite Language, Truth and Logic, the linguistic turn took a decidedly different direction in Oxford’s hands. Ryle and his Oxford colleagues accepted the core theses—the elimination of metaphysics and the centrality of language analysis as philosophical method—but rejected the formal logic that had been Cambridge’s primary tool. Ryle regarded logic as, at best, one new instrument among others. In his view, what mattered about the linguistic turn was not its methodology but its recovery of “philosophy’s oldest aim”: making the unclear clear. “Was this not what Socrates had been seeking?“

Russell and the Cambridge philosophers held that ordinary language was riddled with error and obscurity. Philosophy’s task, as they saw it, was to dismantle language with the rigorous, objective apparatus of formal logic and thereby reveal the logical form and true meaning concealed beneath everyday speech. The Oxford philosophers flatly disagreed. Following the later Wittgenstein, they held that everything in ordinary language was already “in order.” Rather than fixating on the technicalities of formal logic, one ought to attend to the contexts in which language is actually used—the human conditions of everyday speech. In this sense, Oxford’s philosophy of language was a kind of anthropological project.

No example captures the character of ordinary language philosophy more vividly than one from J. L. Austin. Austin begins by asking: what is the difference between doing something “by mistake” and doing it “by accident“? Most people assume the two expressions are more or less interchangeable. Austin then poses the following. Suppose you (1) shoot your neighbour’s donkey, having mistaken it for your own, or (2) fire at your own donkey, but your neighbour’s donkey suddenly leaps into the line of fire and is killed instead. Which expression would you use to explain the situation to your neighbour? The moment you consider Austin’s example, you realise that “by mistake” and “by accident,” while semantically similar, operate in entirely different contexts. The hope of Oxford ordinary language philosophy was that this kind of careful analysis would dispel the mystery and metaphysical fog surrounding philosophy’s oldest problems and lead us toward clearer thinking.

But ordinary language philosophy was already in decline by the 1950s. One line of criticism targeted its deflationary outlook. Marxists charged that the Oxford philosophers, by retreating behind a pose of political neutrality into their ivory tower to fiddle with the trivia of language analysis, had abandoned the philosopher’s duty to transform the world. Another attack came from Cambridge itself. Russell dismissed Oxford philosophy as “peasantry” for its preoccupation with ordinary language (this was his retort to P. F. Strawson’s critique of Russell). Meanwhile, in America, philosophers like W. V. O. Quine were carrying British analytic philosophy in directions the Oxford philosophers had never imagined. Gradually, the Oxford philosophers themselves abandoned ordinary language philosophy, and the era of Ryle, Ayer, and Austin receded into memory. Today’s analytic philosophy is dominated not by Oxford’s homespun ordinary language but by Cambridge’s pedantry and formal logic.

What, then, survives of Oxford philosophy, and what significance—if any—does it still hold? First, it should be noted that Oxford philosophy encompassed far more than ordinary language philosophy alone. The thinkers lumped together as “ordinary language philosophers” were, in fact, among each other’s fiercest—if impeccably polite—critics. Ayer and Austin sparred vigorously; P. F. Strawson criticised his elder Austin and sought to move beyond him. More fundamentally, there were voices within Oxford itself that rejected the ordinary language programme root and branch. The vanguard of this anti-Oxford Oxford philosophy was, notably, all women. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley—though far too diverse in their particulars to be reduced to a single school—shared a commitment to ethics, the very domain that ordinary language philosophy had sidelined, and they fiercely opposed a mainstream that treated ethics as little more than the linguistic analysis of moral propositions. Murdoch drew on French existentialism and the “Continental” philosophy that Oxford had pathologically shunned, weaving it into her philosophical novels. Anscombe absorbed Wittgenstein’s philosophy in her own distinctive way, transmitting it to Oxford and, in the process, laying the groundwork for what are now studied as virtue ethics and the philosophy of action. I devote only a single paragraph to these four not because they are unimportant, but because I plan to read Metaphysical Animals, the book devoted to them, in the near future.

Beyond these individual philosophers, did “Oxford philosophy” as an intellectual movement leave any lasting legacy? The author of this book, Nikhil Krishnan, borrows a phrase from the Oxford metaethicist R. M. Hare and proposes that we understand Oxford not as a school of philosophers but as a school for philosophers. Oxford philosophy was never a unified school sharing a single doctrine or method. But there was a set of common virtues to which Oxford philosophers aspired: “humility, self-awareness, collegiality, elegance, and clarity.”

The Oxford philosophers—though this is no longer the case—devoted most of their time not to publishing papers but to teaching and debating. They valued the uninhibited pursuit of truth through rigorous criticism and open discussion over ceremony and formality. The ability to write with elegance and refinement was a shared virtue. Oxford taught its students “to express their thoughts clearly to themselves and to others, to distinguish where differences exist so as to avoid needless confusion, and not to use a long—or short—word without being prepared to explain what it means.” It emphasised “effective, unambiguous, lucid, and orderly prose,” and held that “such writing is impossible without the same virtues in the thought that underlies it.” Nor was the deflationary vision of Oxford philosophy mere ivory-tower amusement; it was an expression of humility and self-reflection. As Bernard Williams put it, to seek first to understand the world as a condition for transforming it is, no less than rushing headlong into reckless revolution, “itself a creed of political responsibility.”

This catalogue of virtues was neither original to Oxford nor new. If the sophistry that Socrates fought against was the unscrupulous deployment of irrational and cunning rhetoric for personal gain, then the vision of philosophy and the philosopher that Socrates championed was “the disinterested pursuit of truth through rigorous, self-reflective dialogue.” This is a standard that anyone engaged in the philosophical enterprise ought to uphold, regardless of era or school, and it is the most valuable gift that the study of philosophy can bestow. In that sense, Oxford was indeed a school for philosophers.

If the identity of Oxford philosophy is a matter of doctrine or methodology, then Oxford philosophy is dead. It is old, it is stuffy, and it is no longer a subject of serious discussion. But insofar as Oxford philosophy is about the virtues of the philosopher—and, more broadly, of the thinking, inquiring human being—Oxford philosophy is still very much alive.