A Terribly Serious Adventure
Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Teeming with Oxford characters [and] lively storytelling . . . [recasts] the history of philosophy at Oxford in the mid-twentieth century by conveying not only what made it influential in its time but also what might make it vital in ours.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Ordinary Language can hardly convey how much I loved this book.”—Tom Stoppard, Times Literary Supplement (“Books of the Year 2023”)
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krishnan, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Cambridge, debuts with an ambitious but underwhelming study of "Oxford philosophy," an intellectual tradition defined by such virtues as humility, self awareness, and directness. Aiming to convey "not just what people thought but they were like," Krishnan profiles a large cast of characters who studied and taught at Oxford between the world wars, including novelist and moral philosopher Iris Murdoch, whose forays into French existentialism led her to publish the "first comprehensive work in English" on Sartre, and J.L. Austin, a proponent of "ordinary language philosophy," who sought "to ‘dissolve' philosophical problems by showing them to emerge out of misunderstandings of language." Though the premise fascinates, Krishnan struggles to weave the philosophers' narratives together, resulting in a history that sometimes feels like a hodgepodge of amusing anecdotes rather than a unified whole. Links between the philosophers' personal lives and the development of Oxford philosophy are also occasionally unclear—for instance, Krishnan notes that there were "sectarians of at least three different stripes" at Oxford when Gilbert Ryle arrived but doesn't fully explain how they might have affected Ryle's development as a philosopher, or the evolution of Oxford philosophy as a whole. Despite some bright moments, this never quite comes together.
