During the period roughly of the 1950s Oxford was generally regarded as the most important center of philosophy in the world, the one where the most interesting philosophical activity was going on. It was indeed so distinctive that the very name ‘Oxford Philosophy’ meant not just the philosophy that happened to be practiced in Oxford but a special kind of philosophy that gave a central importance to the study of language as the major topic of philosophical investigation. It is not an exaggeration to describe this period as a golden age of Oxford Philosophy. Quite by coincidence, my initial stay in Oxford from 1952–1959 happened to be during the high watermark of Oxford Philosophy. I want now to recall some of the features of that decade if only to provoke others to correct my misperceptions and misunderstandings. What follows is not intended as a work of historical scholarship but as personal reminiscences.
When I first went up to Oxford in 1952 as a beginning undergraduate, it was not with the conviction that Oxford was the best place in the world to study Philosophy; when I left and gave up my position as Lecturer at Christ Church to be a beginning faculty member in Berkeley in 1959, it was not because I thought the glory days of Oxford were over. On the contrary, when I first went to Oxford, I had never heard of any of the prominent philosophers, such as Austin, Strawson or Anscombe, who came to have a profound influence on me and my education. And when I left in 1959 I assumed that Oxford would continue to be the preeminent philosophy center in the world. Perhaps it is important to mention these things because I have more than once read accounts to the effect that I went to Oxford as an American graduate student to study philosophy with Austin. Nothing could be further from the truth. I got a Rhodes Scholarship when I was a nineteen year old undergraduate. Still unclear about what I should study, when I matriculated after my twentieth birthday in P.P.E. I became seriously interested in philosophy as a possible profession in my second year in Oxford.
Why was Oxford so important in that period? I think the philosophers assembled there, people who taught me when I was an undergraduate, formed one of the greatest collections of philosophers in one place since Athens in the fifth century B.C. It is true that there were no towering geniuses, like Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, but there just was an awful lot of very talented philosophers on the ground, and they all were very actively engaged in the subject. Here is a list of some of the people who taught me in my undergraduate years 1952–55 in lectures, seminars, and tutorials: J.L. Austin, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampsire, H.L.A. Hart, Mary Warnock, Geoffrey Warnock, W.V.O. Quine (Eastman professor in 1953), Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot, Bernard Williams, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Dummett, H.H. Price, J.O. Urmson, H.P. Grice, James Thomson, Gilbert Ryle, David Pears, Friedrich Waismann, R.M. Hare, Patrick Nowell-Smith and Anthony Quinton. There were others, somewhat less famous, who made an impression on me and who I thought were extremely intelligent philosophers, among them, George Paul, and Oscar Wood.
Not only was Oxford the best place in the world to study philosophy, but within the university itself philosophy was the most exciting, prestigious, intellectually active discipline. Oxford was unusual among universities known to me anywhere in the western world in that philosophy was the dominant subject. More students took philosophy than any other subject and, at least in the fifties, the greatest prestige went to philosophy. The tacit assumption was that those capable of doing philosophy did philosophy and those who were not or who had some special gift for another discipline did something else. But the subject that attracted the best people was philosophy. This is important for the account that follows because several people who, in some other intellectual milieu, would not have ended up in philosophy became philosophers in Oxford because it was the thing to do.
The style of philosophizing was also unusual, more like fifth century B.C. Athens than, for example, nineteenth century Germany. It was a matter of endless philosophical discussions and conversations. These were conducted officially in seminars, tutorials, and in the meetings of the numerous philosophical societies both at the student level, and at the level of the faculty, but equally important were the endless philosophical discussions among the philosophers of all ages assembled in Oxford. I know I learned as much from my arguments with my student friends, many of whom were brilliant philosophers, as I did from many of my teachers. Among my closest friends as an undergraduate were Frank Cioffi and Nigel Lawson. And, of course, the tutorial system was ideally suited to philosophical discussion. I have to say the best teaching in philosophy I ever had was the period when I had Peter Strawson as my tutor, one on one.
The distinctive feature of Oxford at that time, what made it stand out as the best place in the world to do philosophy, was its preoccupation with something called ordinary language. This had two distinct aspects. First, there is what might be called Linguistic Philosophy. The idea behind Linguistic Philosophy was that many of the traditional philosophical problems could be solved if we paid very close attention to the actual use of the words involved. So, for example, the problem of scepticism was supposed to be a problem of whether or not we could have genuine knowledge, and whether or not our beliefs could be adequately supported by evidence. The typical view in Oxford in those days was that if you were going to take this view seriously you have to become very clear about the ordinary use of the word ‘know’. What counts as knowing and not knowing; and similarly with words like ‘evidence’, ‘reason’, ‘belief’, ‘support’, etc. In its strongest form, the hope was that if we got really clear about these, the philosophical problem of knowledge would simply dissolve. We would realize that our philosophical forbears had placed impossible demands on what could count as knowledge. But if we actually got into the marketplace and found how people use the word ‘know’, we would see that we are justified in saying of a lot of things, that we ‘know’ them to be true. The grandfather of this method of philosophizing was G.E. Moore, its patron saint was Wittgenstein, and its leading figure in Oxford was Austin.
A second approach to language and its relation to philosophy I call the Philosophy of Language to distinguish it from Linguistic Philosophy. The Philosophy of Language is concerned with the nature and functioning of language, not so much of specific languages, like English or French, but of the general properties that any language would have, such as reference and truth.
There was some overlap between linguistic philosophy and the philosophy of language, because, of course, many of the general features of language such as truth can be examined by studying the ordinary use of the word ‘true’. But as Austin often pointed out, ordinary language is not very good at describing itself and we have a rather limited repertoire of semantic terms for describing the workings of language, so it seemed necessary to invent a technical vocabulary. Austin did just that with his theory of speech acts.
Within these two general problem-sets in philosophy, it is essential to distinguish several different strands or styles of philosophizing that went on in Oxford at that time. For purposes of exposition, I will distinguish three different types of Oxford philosophy. First, there was what might be called ‘the pure investigation of language’. The leading figure here was obviously Austin, and indeed Austin was the most influential philosopher in Oxford during the period under discussion. Austin studied language, so to speak, for its own sake. He was obsessed with the details of the operations of actual languages and he thought that whatever else we might do in philosophy, this was certainly one important area of activity. A second strand, which is actually quite different, was more influenced by Wittgenstein. The dominant figure here was without doubt Elizabeth Anscombe, and there were a number of other people such as Philippa Foot who also worked in this style. Then Anscombe was not so much famous as a philosopher in her own right as she was famous for her translations and interpretations of the work of Wittgenstein. She was regarded as Wittgenstein's leading messenger and interpreter, not only in Oxford but probably in the whole world at the time. The third type of philosophizing that went on in Oxford was much more traditional. The people working in this style, such as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, were very interested in the history of the subject, and though they were active in the linguistic philosophizing that went on, it was from a somewhat detached spectator's point of view.
Austin
I have several times read how much Austin was influenced by Wittgenstein. This is entirely false. Austin hated the obscurity and the Continental style of apparent profundity that was common in Wittgenstein. He admired Moore much more than Wittgenstein. Indeed, probably the most unintelligent remark I ever heard Austin make was when he said about Wittgenstein, ‘It's all in Moore’. You have to understand this sentence with the peculiar pronunciation of Oxford English at the time. The English, then as now, had a problem with final ‘r's, so Moore's name was pronounced more like ‘Mwoah’.
Austin was the dominant intellectual figure in Oxford in the 1950s, when he was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. At the time, in my stupidity, I could not recognize Austin's intellectual superiority. I had the illusion that I was quicker than he in argument, and since we had many arguments, I had the illusion that he was not as great a philosopher as other people maintained
The key to understanding Austin's style was his desire for precision and exactitude. Even in casual conversation Austin did not tolerate loose talk. I once said casually to Austin that if you got a diamond tip needle for your long playing records it will last for years. ‘For years?’ said Austin. Well, I had to admit, not for years, but perhaps for many months, maybe longer than a year. That was typical of Austin. He insisted on exactitude. This technique in philosophy seemed to me somewhat limited. He insisted on taking everything absolutely literally. So, for example, when I was an undergraduate, a bunch of us went to his undergraduate informal instruction and, at my suggestion, we studied Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, then recently published. Austin had nothing but disdain for this work. His method was to take everything Wittgenstein said exactly literally. So at one point Wittgenstein said: ‘Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”.’Footnote 1 So Austin said ironically, ‘Alright, next week, everyone bring a box with a beetle in it.’ But then he points out, that later on, Wittgenstein says: ‘…the box might even be empty’. Austin, shaking his head, with exasperation points out that ‘this is a plain contradiction’. Another feature of Austin's style which I have not seen remarked on before was his habit of striking a match to light his pipe while holding the lighted match in one hand and the pipe in the other hand and continuing a conversation with his interlocutor; as we all watched the flame burning closer and closer to his fingers, until, without taking his eyes off the interlocutor, with a wave of his hand he would shake the flame out and then light another match and begin the entire procedure again.
It always puzzled me why Austin had such an enormous intellectual influence in Oxford and this was partly because of my failure to see his genuine intellectual distinction. But also, I am still convinced it was partly because most of the dons in Oxford had been students at various English boarding schools. Austin was in a sense the ultimate English schoolmaster. He could look you in the eye (and I was not impervious to these influences) and say: ‘Why did you use the subjunctive?’ And if you didn't know why you had used the subjunctive, you felt like a total idiot. Once he said to me: ‘What does the “sup” in “suppose” mean?’ It's hard for me to repeat this without imitating his precise form of expression, but there it was.
When we were in philosophical discussion, Austin and I tended to become totally obsessed and forget about everything else. Once, after one of his lectures on a Saturday morning in the Examination Schools, we stood about in the lecture hall discussing some points about perception long after everyone else had gone home. And when, after I do not know how long, we had decided to leave the building we found that the building was completely locked. We could not get out. We wandered around for a long time before we found an employee capable of unlocking a door for us.
Though I was not fully aware of Austin's intellectual distinction until after he was dead, it now seems obvious to me that he had a profound influence on many aspects of my life. I could never do philosophy with his immense precision and attention to the details of English usage that he exacted. But my first book, Speech Acts, was essentially a matter of carrying on work that he had begun. I was attempting to continue a project that he has initiated. Furthermore – and I only found this some decades later – he was responsible for me getting my job in Berkeley. ‘If you can't hire me, hire Searle’, he is reputed to have told my future colleagues in Berkeley. And finally, not least, I met my future wife, Dagmar, in Austin's office. He introduced us. A couple of years later when we got married I wrote a note to Austin, then away in America, to inform him of this plan. His response was, ‘I think the affair very well-conceived’.
Isaiah Berlin
So much has been written about Isaiah Berlin that almost anything that I say has been said over and over. But there are a few things that have not been emphasized in published accounts about Isaiah that I want to mention.
It is often said that a genius is someone who invents his own career. By that criterion Isaiah was a genius. He, in a sense, failed at mainstream philosophy, not in the sense that other people thought that he was a failure, but he felt he did not reach the level of the people he most admired, such as Austin. So Isaiah chose to become, in a sense, an intellectual historian, but not a conventional intellectual historian. He was constantly engaged in debates with historical figures whose own view of intellectual history and political values was quite different from his own. A standard criticism of Isaiah is that he never took on the heavy weights such as Kant and Aristotle. But to make this criticism is to miss the point of what he was trying to do. He was not trying to do conventional history of philosophy, or even intellectual history, rather he was picking up certain themes in a constant struggle between liberalism and various forms of intellectual oppressionism, and between historicist and anti-historicist conceptions of philosophy. He was unusual in advocating a kind of liberal historicism.
Isaiah was famous for his loquaciousness, and I think that he is the best conversationalist I ever met in my life. My guess is it that it is quite likely that he is the best conversationalist in the English language since Samuel Johnson. However, it is important to remember that the great conversationalists tend to be great monologists. In any conversation, Isaiah did most of the talking and he did it in his famous machine gun style of delivery. He could speak with immense speed and volubility, piling modifiers, adjectives and interior parentheses one upon another, nonetheless, if you listened carefully, it all made perfect sense. Though Isaiah did most of the talking, you never had the feeling that you were left out of the conversation, and this is another feature of Isaiah's genius: he always made people feel that they were more intelligent than they ever thought they could be. So, for example, I remember in typical conversations he would engage me in a discussion about, for example, Herzen, one of his favorite Russian writers and somehow I would find that I had opinions about Herzen that I didn't know I had. A typical conversation would begin, ‘I say, John, I have been thinking again about Herzen and I wonder what you think about that passage in his autobiography where…’, and then would go on for example about where Herzen's wife had an affair with a mediocre poet or some other such event and soon you would find yourself engaged in a discussion where you would be expressing opinions and Isaiah would be challenging them.
One of the things that I think is misleading in the standard accounts of Isaiah is the extent to which he is described as a sort of voluble Jewish, Russian teddy bear. All of that is okay as far as it goes, but it is essential to realize exactly how tough and critical Isaiah was in his judgments of other people. I was constantly taken aback by his savagely negative opinions of many people who were close to him, and indeed of many people whom I admired. Once, to my surprise, he described a person who was fairly close to him as a second-rate intellect (I do not remember the exact words he used). I was stunned by the severity of the judgment. On another occasion, when we were dining at High Table in Christ Church, we had an argument about the intellectual quality of a philosopher whom I admired enormously and whom Isaiah did not admire very much at all, Isaiah insisted on getting the Christ Church betting book. (The betting book was a survival of an old 19th century custom whereby dons wrote down bets which were later decided and paid off.) Isaiah proposed a bet that my admired person would eventually have a reputation equal to that of H.H Price. I bet that his reputation would continue at its present higher-than-Price standard. The assumptions here are quite stunning. It was assumed that there was a more or less exact reputation that H.H. Price had, and that Isaiah and I both agreed on it, and that it was just a matter of appraising the subject of the bet in relation to this fixed standard. The terms of the bet were that he bet me a case of French champagne if I won, and I bet him a case of California champagne if he won. This was just before I set off for California, and we never settled the question who won the bet. Though, if he were alive today, I am sure we could renew that discussion.
Isaiah essentially gave up doing analytic philosophy and did his personal kind of cultural and intellectual history. I have not seen this point remarked on, but it struck me in my many conversations with him that it bothered him that he could not do the Oxford kind of philosophy. Or rather, that he could not do it at the level of the people he most admired such as J.L. Austin. Austin and Isaiah had totally different personalities, backgrounds and interests, yet they both admired each other and, as far as I know, remained friends for as long as Austin lived.
Elizabeth
Elizabeth Anscombe is worth careful attention because, among other reasons, she is among the best women philosophers who ever lived, and she is the best of those known to me. To describe her adequately you would have to have the gifts of a novelist, something I lack. One way to start describing her would be to contrast her with Austin. They were more or less exact opposites. Austin was thin, wizened, tweedy, pipe-smoking, very precise – even in the most casual conversation – scholarly and schoolmasterly. Austin radiated analytical intelligence. Elizabeth was short, dumpy, disorganized, obscure in philosophical presentations, voluble and spontaneous in conversation and totally unlike any stereotype that one can imagine. Descriptions are easiest to give when one can appeal to stereotypes understood by the reader, or at least use general terms which the reader can understand and which fit the subject of the description. Both of these are impossible for Elizabeth. She did not fit any stereotype known to me, and the general terms that I am going to use are clearly inadequate. Once when the Manchester Guardian did a series on successful women professionals, they interviewed Elizabeth and asked her, ‘How do you manage a household with a husband and six children while carrying on your full-time career?’ Elizabeth answered, ‘You just have to realize that dirt doesn't matter.’ The Guardian declined to print that particular sentence, presumably because it did not match the stereotype of successful professional women that they were trying to portray.
It would not be correct to describe Elizabeth as ‘fat’, rather she came across as more or less shapeless. She invariably wore trousers and once we all returned from one of the between term vacations to discover that in the interim Elizabeth had given birth to her sixth child. None of us had known she was even pregnant. ‘More Geach’ he was called. This was not intended as a pun. He was named after Sir Thomas More.
Elizabeth had a soft, almost kindly face and an easy smile. The most disconcerting feature of her physiognomy were her eyes. She had an eye defect which made it impossible for her eyes to focus both on the same object. So when you stood near her and looked directly into her eyes they seemed almost to envelop you, rather than to look straight at your eyes. Incidentally, she used her eye defect very effectively in philosophical arguments. Whenever anybody said anything about perception, especially visual perception, she could always say something about her visual experiences which were an immediate counterexample. ‘Right now I see a large yellow blotch on the wall opposite’, for example.
Elizabeth once gave a lecture on the evils of the modern world and cited three enormous evils: The existence of interest on loans (usury). I forget the third but the one that sticks in my mind was the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Apparently she had a lot of problems with this organization. They would innocently send some hapless social worker out to lecture Elizabeth on how to raise her children and one can only imagine what Elizabeth would do to this unfortunate. Once in the presence of Susan Sontag a child came to her and said, ‘Can I go out in St. Giles and play?’ and Elizabeth said, ‘No dear the police just don't understand’. One incident will reveal the truth behind the remark to the Manchester Guardian. When I was tutored by her husband, Peter Geach, (at Austin's suggestion, by the way) I went weekly to their house at 27 St. John's Street. The first week I noticed there was a half empty cup of coffee sitting in the middle of the living room rug. As the weeks passed that cup of coffee grew first a cover of detritus which then gradually turned into a mold that developed during the term and was still growing in my last week.
Elizabeth was famous for not caring in the least what people thought of her and I think this is probably true. She did what she felt was the right thing to do and really did not care about other people's reactions. This is not to deny, however, that she had a dramatic flair and dramatic impact. Once in a seminar in the middle of proceedings she simply jumped up and acted as if she were going to throw up. She shouted, ‘I am going to be sick’ while grabbing at her throat and leaning over. Bernard Williams, who was one of the people running the seminar, said with his usual ironic tone, ‘literally or philosophically?’ Elizabeth then turned her enveloping eyes on all of us and said, ‘Fooled you, didn't I?’ She was trying to make some deep, Wittgensteinian point about behavioral criteria for the attribution of psychological predicates. But I do not think any of us got that point. We were all struck by the oddity of her behavior.
Her indifference to other people's opinions often led her to behaviour which had the effect of cruelty. Once in Berkeley she gave a lecture about the intentionality of perception (a very confused lecture by the way). In the discussion which followed one of my colleagues, who was a devout and inveterate anglophile, asked a question. Elizabeth turned on him savagely and said, ‘You obviously haven't understood anything I said’. She said this with such cruelty and ferocity that the victim simply shriveled. He was humiliated.
Feminists recently have made a certain amount of mileage out of Elizabeth's distinction as a philosopher. She exemplifies the possibilities of great achievements by women philosophers, however, I think that many of the feminists who admire her would not have been admired by her. The only time in my dealings with her when she made remarks that could be construed as feminist in the contemporary sense was once when I was head of the Voltaire Society and we sent out invitations to a party. Elizabeth came up to me at another party and said, ‘John! The most extraordinary thing!’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Well, we have received an invitation addressed to Mr. and Mrs. P. Geach.’ ‘Yes?’ I asked. ‘Well, I can tell you there is no “Mrs. P. Geach” and if there were I should be the first to know about it!’ No one ever was allowed to address her by her married name.
By the way, forms of address in that time were very important in Oxford. No one ever addressed Austin by his first name. Once, Stephen Toulmin had the temerity to call him ‘John’ at which point there was a long pause in the conversation and Austin said with his cold precision, ‘Austin is also a Christian name’. Toulmin had this audacity because he and Austin were married to sisters and he, presumably because they were brothers-in-law, thought he would be allowed a certain degree of familiarity.
Austin's most savage criticism which he leveled with that fierce expression of his was, ‘It's just loose’. And indeed Austin was constantly combating looseness. Once when we were having a conversation alone together he said sadly, ‘There is a lot of loose thinking going on in this town!’ I too shook my head, sharing his sadness as I thought of all the loose thinking radiating out from Carfax way out both the Banbury and Woodstock roads, out to Iffley and Cowley and maybe even down St. Aldates and past Folly Bridge, everywhere in Oxford: loose thinking.
Anscombe was a chain smoker. In a seminar you typically saw her with a pack of cigarettes and a large box of kitchen matches. When she finished one cigarette she started another. In her later years she smoked cigarillos. The story that was told (I have no independent evidence for its truth) is that when one of her children was seriously ill, in her prayers to God she made a deal: if the child survives she would give up smoking cigarettes. Well, the child did survive but apparently God did not read the fine print. She did indeed stop smoking cigarettes but she kept right on smoking in the same way, only this time cigarillos rather than conventional cigarettes.
I only saw Anscombe and Austin confront each other, face to face at any length on one occasion. Confrontations of opposing views in Oxford were, by the way, very common. Grice and Austin taught a famous seminar on Aristotle which became known as the irresistible force (Austin) and the immovable object (Grice), but that is another story. The occasion of Anscombe versus Austin was a symposium at the Aristotelian society on the subject of ‘Pretending’ with Stuart Hampshire in the chair. Elizabeth was extremely nervous but made the obvious point that in discussing pretending you have to distinguish between the genuine pretence, where you are actually trying to deceive the observer, and the mock performance, where you are just acting as if. This is a point that Austin had missed but what he did in typical fashion was to pounce on the use of the word ‘mock’. He said, ‘It is not a mock performance, not at all’. Anscombe became more and more nervous, smoking more frantically. Austin used one of his typical rhetorical devices. He said, ‘I have fifteen questions for Miss Anscombe.’ Of course she could not possibly answer fifteen questions in the time available for her to reply to his criticisms. At the end of the session Stuart Hampshire said to me, ‘It seems to me Miss Anscombe had rather the better of the argument and I did not see how I could conceal this fact from the general public.’
In any case, Austin disliked Anscombe intensely. He referred to her as ‘That ninny’. People who had to work with her usually had a negative reaction. When she and Bernard Williams were both professors in Cambridge and thus had professorial responsibilities requiring them to deal with each other, Williams was exasperated, frustrated and enraged by the difficulties of dealing with Elizabeth on a day to day administrative basis. I do not remember the exact terminology he used but it was certainly even more hostile than Austin's. Austin, by the way, had enormous respect for her husband, Peter Geach, both as a philosopher of language and as a scholar in the history of the subject. It was at his insistence that I got Geach as supervisor. When he asked me who I wanted to supervise my PhD thesis I said, ‘Well, either you or Peter Strawson’. Austin said, ‘You will talk to us in any case. Get someone you would not otherwise talk to.’ ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Try Geach’, he said. So I did.
Again, I do not wish to give the impression that Austin and Anscombe were somehow equal figures in stature in Oxford, not at all. Elizabeth was famous almost entirely because of her connection with Wittgenstein. She was his translator, his interpreter and his leading disciple and spokesman in Oxford at the time. Austin was the acknowledged dominant figure in Oxford philosophy. A lot of people opposed him and indeed many, it seemed to me, hated him quite unreasonably. So Michael Dummett, a brilliant philosopher, as far as I know never had a kind thing to say about Austin. It is an irony of Austin's career that though he was famous in his life for his attention to the minute details of language and was constantly criticized for an absence of overall theories; it seems to me that exactly the reverse is the case. His most lasting contribution is in his theory of speech acts.Footnote 2 And on the details, though he was very careful, he quite often got things wrong.
Royaumont
In the spring of 1958 there was held at the Medieval Abbey of Royaumont near Paris, an international conference, the purpose of which was to enable a confrontation and interaction between Anglophone philosophy and French philosophy. Then as now there was believed to be a sharp distinction between the styles of philosophizing that have since become called ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’. Oxford was clearly the center of analytic philosophy, so it was heavily represented at Royaumont. It is important to emphasize how unusual this conference was. Nowadays international conferences devoted to ad hoc questions have become as common as wine in France. David Lodge has even written a funny novel called Small World about these conferences. But in 1958 it was a great rarity. Conferences were annually held for existing organizations, like the American Philosophical Association or the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society. But conferences whose sole purpose was to discuss a specific issue among international participants were almost unheard of. In any case, a rather sizeable contingent of us went off to this French former monastery to talk with each other and to our French opposite numbers. I was very much a beginning philosopher and was not invited to speak in the program, though I did take part in the discussions. Among the Anglophone participants Quine was probably the most famous, though Austin, Hare, Ryle, Strawson, Williams and a number of others were there also. The styles of philosophizing were immediately apparent when the chair of the conference, Eric Weil, described Ryle as ‘chef d'ecole’. This was ridiculous because we had no chef-d'ecole, in fact we did not even think of ourselves as an ecole, and if we had one it most certainly would not have been Ryle. Ryle was regarded with affection and respect but no one thought that he was the leader of anything. Various people's character emerged in this conference. Ryle behaved very badly. He gave a paper on Husserl in which, among other things, he said that Husserl was severely limited by the fact that, unlike Oxford dons, he did not have dinner every night at an Oxford college where he could discuss questions with a whole lot of people from other disciplines, the sciences especially. At the end of this lecture the head of the Husserl archives in Louvain, Father Van Breda, got up and in an outraged tone gave a lecture to the effect that Husserl was in touch with the best scientists and mathematicians of his generation, and he gave a list of the great thinkers who were in personal communication with Husserl. At the end of this outburst Ryle grumped in his gruff way, ‘What I said about Husserl was intended as a parody. I don't care if it is true or false.’ There was a gasp of outrage among the French participants when Ryle said he did not care if it was true or false.
I talked to many of the Frenchmen at this gathering. The general opinion was that the only two Anglophones that impressed them were Austin and Bernard Williams. Austin read a paper that since became something of a classic in French, ‘Performatif/Constatif’. There was one slightly comical moment when the translator had a problem with the French and asked Austin what was the original English that he had written. Austin turned to him with some asperity and said, ‘I wrote it in French’. Bernard gave a talk on Descartes, ‘La Certitude du Cogito’ which impressed the French both by its scholarship and by its philosophical understanding of Descartes. But the other Anglophones, according to one Frenchman I spoke with, operated at about the level of an examination for the Agregation.
Another feature of Austin's character that annoyed me immensely is that he saw me talking to an elderly and distinguished French philosopher, Jean Wahl, and he came over to me and said, ‘Don't waste your time on the aged. Talk to the young!’ This annoyed me because I thought that Austin's conception of our presence there was to make converts, that we were there not to discuss philosophy for its own sake, but to convert the local population to our ways of doing it. I talked to Jean Wahl not because I wanted to convert him but because I wanted to discuss philosophical issues with him.
Bernard Williams
Up to this point I have been able to speak with complete candor about the people who taught me how to do philosophy in Oxford in the 1950s. With Bernard Williams and Peter Strawson the situation is a bit more awkward because they were not just teachers of mine but became very close personal friends. I know too much about their personal lives to be able to speak with the total openness and candor that I have been able to about people such as Elizabeth, who for me was a kind of public figure. The solution to my problem is this: I will simply talk about Williams and Strawson as if they were just teachers of mine. I will leave out any details of their personal lives unless these are the sorts of things that are or could become widely known and which bear on their philosophical achievements.
For sheer intelligence Bernard Williams was the most powerful figure that I met in Oxford in the 1950s, in philosophy or in any other subject. Even in the most casual conversation Bernard could be quite dazzling. He also, like a lot of brilliant people, has a wonderfully ironic wit and sense of humor.
For all of the brilliant works of philosophy that Bernard wrote, anyone who knew him always had the feeling that the published work was not quite up to the level of the man. The published books and articles are indeed among the best things to come out of the philosophy of his era, but one always felt that the peculiar dazzle that one got in conversation with Bernard or when he taught a class or gave a lecture never quite came across completely in the published work. I think there is a deep reason for this. Bernard never achieved the greatness in philosophy that he was capable of because he never really took the subject all that seriously. I am not quite certain why he did not take it very seriously, but I think one reason is that he found it, in a sense, too easy. He could see immediately the limitations in other people's arguments, and I sometimes felt he often saw the limitations in his own. He was trained as a classical scholar, and his philosophy was, as he himself described it, an extension of what he had been trained to do as a schoolboy when he became expert at Greek and Latin. The Oxford Lit. Hum. Program suited him perfectly because he was a brilliant classical scholar to start, and he had a natural ability for, and interest in, philosophy. But what Bernard lacked was the desperation necessary to achieve greatness in the subject. Austin, Grice and Strawson all in their different ways had that level of desperation, or at least they had it at certain times in their life when they were producing original work. I realize that ‘desperation’ will seem inappropriate for these tweedy, self-possessed Englishmen, and maybe another word for it would be vanity. All three of the ones I mentioned, Austin, Grice and Strawson, cared desperately about their reputations and how they were perceived. Grice, in particular, was overwhelmingly vain and, like Austin but unlike Strawson, was very anxious to have disciples, to be surrounded with admiring followers who encouraged and supported his work and hung on his every remark. There is a sense in which Bernard did not give a damn. He was clever at the subject, he enjoyed doing it at least some of the time, but in the end it was to him a kind of ‘mental masturbation’, as he once described how certain scientists thought of philosophy, and as I think he sometimes thought of it himself. Like a lot of Englishmen who have never studied science after about the age of fourteen, he had an exaggerated sense of the rigors and intellectual satisfaction of scientific research. Though he did not lament the fact that he was not a scientist, I think he often felt that science was a superior endeavor to philosophy.
I think he thought that truth was possible in science but that in philosophy there was always an element of inadequacy. He could do it well, and he was rewarded and celebrated for doing it, but he did not really take it very seriously. When he was a visiting professor at Princeton I had some very long conversations with him about this, and he said that he did not feel the kind of commitment to philosophy that some philosophers feel. He said he was not as good at mathematical logic as Michael Dummett, and he did not have the commitment to the mathematical branch of philosophy.
I think that in the last months of his life his attitude changed quite strikingly and he became immensely productive. In the space of a couple of years, when it was obvious to him and everyone else that he was dying, he produced a number of books the importance of which we have yet to gauge.
With all of that said, there was also a certain vanity about Bernard's conception of himself in philosophy. He once said to me, ‘I set the agenda’. I think that that is not the sort of thing one is entitled to say even if one believes it to be true. Another sign of his independence is that he does not appear to have been much influenced by other philosophers. He was pretty much immune to the enormous impact of Wittgenstein on the Oxford of the ‘50s, and he was never a follower of Austin. Indeed, Austin is reputed to have felt that he had doubts about the future of Oxford, or at least his future in Oxford, because he was unable to attract the attention, interest and commitment of Bernard Williams.
Bernard tended to admire philosophers who were outside the mainstream. He discovered Nietzsche when he was already well advanced in philosophy, and though he was contemptuous of Nietzsche's looseness at first, he became as much a follower of Nietzsche as he was capable of being of any other philosopher. He once said to me about Nietzsche that he thought it was ‘about 80% true’. I cannot imagine any other philosopher of whom Bernard would say that. I think he especially liked Nietzsche's cynicism about mainstream academic life and academic philosophy. Another philosopher whom Bernard admired and felt was unjustly neglected was Collingwood. I am not quite sure why Bernard admired Collingwood so much, but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that Collingwood stood outside the mainstream of 20th century English philosophy, and in his own way was fiercely independent.
No one can talk about Bernard without talking about his fantastic sense of humour. At any gathering, at any party for example, if there was a corner of a room where there were howls and hoots of laughter, then you could be sure that Bernard Williams was carrying forth in that enclave.
Bernard Williams was so talented that I believe he would have been a success and a major force in any profession that he had selected. I think that if he had grown up in another culture, for example, the United States, he would not have ended up as a professional philosopher. That he became a philosopher was in part a peculiarity of the British educational system. As a schoolboy, his gifts were recognized, and in a culture in which classical scholarship was admired more than anything else, it is not surprising that he became an ace at Greek and Latin. When he got up to Oxford it was assumed that he had a great future, and indeed the great Oxford classicist of the time reportedly thought that he would become the leading classicist of his generation. In Oxford he discovered that his adolescent interests in philosophy could also find a professional expression in the Greats School. So it was in the peculiar situation of Oxford in that that he could professionally do what he was already good at doing, classics, and found that he enjoyed anyway, philosophy. But I never sensed in Bernard the desperate commitment to philosophy that one finds in many of the best philosophers of the present area, including some of his own generation, such as Michael Dummett.
Austin's Status
It is hard to exaggerate the influence and stature that Austin had in Oxford in the 1950s. I was always puzzled by this because it was not until after he died in 1960 that I became fully aware of his real importance, or for that matter aware of his influence on me. At the time, I thought there were better philosophers in Oxford, but most people did not. This was brought home to me once in a seminar that I attended regularly, conducted by Paul Grice and Geoffrey Warnock on perception. Austin attended these seminars regularly and often made contributions in the discussion. Once, as the seminar was about to start, I looked around and noticed that Austin had not arrived. I was sitting next to the people conducting the seminar. Grice said to Warnock, sotto voce. ‘Austin's not here yet. Do you suppose it is alright if we start?’ This seemed to me a stunning thing to say. These were both famous philosophers and Austin had no special role in the seminar. It was not being given by him and he was not in any way committed to attend.
Peter Strawson
If Bernard Williams was the most intelligent person I met in Oxford in that era, the best philosopher, in my experience, was Peter Strawson. It was something of an accident that I came to be tutored by Peter Strawson, but all the same it changed my life. Tutorials with Peter were unlike any that I had in Oxford as an undergraduate. British English at the time used ‘clever’ instead of ‘intelligent’ to describe a superior intellectual capacity. To Americans, ‘clever’ hints at a kind of quick superficiality. Intelligence is a much more serious and admirable trait than cleverness. In any case, at the time people would have granted me that Strawson was a ‘clever chap’, indeed even a ‘frightfully clever chap’. Unlike any other tutor I had, he insisted on my handing in my essays a day in advance. I do not know, perhaps this is now common among undergraduate tutors, but it was unknown in Oxford at the time. So I struggled to write something legible for him to read, this on a portable manual typewriter that I owned with my two finger typing. I still have those essays, much faded but still legible. It was invariably a peculiar intellectual experience, and it typically went something like the following: Peter would say, ‘It seems to me that what you are in fact arguing is something like the following.’ Then he would give an extremely powerful and elegant presentation of what I had been struggling to formulate, one that I though vastly superior in capturing the essence of my opinions. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I would say enthusiastically. And he would say, ‘Well then, it does seem to me that that view is subject to the following four objections’, whereupon he would simply demolish the theory step by step. The interesting thing about this is that though my views were almost invariably refuted by Peter, there was never anything unfriendly or hostile in his comments. The whole enterprise was conducted in a wonderful atmosphere of cooperation. Basically, we felt that we were engaged in the most exciting project, philosophy, in the best place in the world to conduct that project, and we were trying to conduct this at the highest cooperative level. I was frequently refuted but never defeated. When I say that Peter was the best philosopher, I think he had the best intellectual grip on the material of philosophy of anyone that I encountered at the time. Peter admired literature as much as, and in some ways more than, he admired philosophy. I think that he would have been even happier as a poet, but, as far as I know, the peculiar gifts that he had in philosophy were not matched by his poetic abilities. This is not to say that he did philosophy reluctantly or regretfully; it is just to say that he did not think it was the highest form of human intellectual endeavor; that for him was reserved for literature. He did once say to me that he thought the sort of immortality that one could attain in philosophy was not like that of literature, where the poet's actual poems would continue to be read and reread, but rather he thought that one could correct certain mistakes and those mistakes would no longer be made after one was dead. As a result of one's efforts, certain errors would be removed.
I came to have Strawson as a tutor by a rather circuitous route. At the time, my girlfriend, if I may so describe her, was Marie-Lyse Cantacuzene, a Romanian princess who had a Cambridge degree and was living at the Strawsons’. She was renting a room in the Strawson house. I, as an undergraduate, was an admirer of Peter, and I asked Marie-Lyse if she would ask Peter if he would be willing to tutor me. I had not even met him at that time. To my great delight, he agreed to tutor me. This was an occasion for some awkwardness. Christ Church employed three full-time philosophy tutors, and they did not relish the extra expense of farming me out to another college (the expression ‘farm out’ was the term used when an undergraduate at one college was sent to another college for tutorials). But in the end in Oxford, if one is persistent, one tends to get what one wants. I wanted very much to be tutored by Peter, so I was farmed out for a period to ‘Univ.’
Peter's best book, I think everyone would agree, is Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. This book did not have the influence of Austin's How to do Things with Words, but it was as good as any book that came out of Oxford in the 1950s. It did go a long way toward making the topic of metaphysics respectable again in philosophy. Peter did this by defining the concept of descriptive metaphysics, where the aim was to describe the basic features of our conceptual structure and how it relates to reality, rather than prescriptive or revisionary metaphysics that attempts to change our conception of reality by offering the description of the metaphysical features of the world that differs from our ordinary common sense conception. Interestingly though, at the time, the book was not admired in Oxford by the people one would have expected or hoped would admire it. Grice, who was a very close friend of Peter and who had worked with Peter on some important projects, was, to my mind, surprisingly hostile to the book. He did not like it at all. I had him to lunch in Christ Church at about the time it came out, and he was quite surprisingly hostile. Austin was simply dismissive. He said to me ‘Strawson will do these things when he gets out of my clutches’. I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that there might be an element of jealously in both of these reactions. Peter had obviously written an important book, he thanked no one in it for their contributions except Herbert Hart, who read the manuscript and made some comments.
One source of objection was that Peter had had the temerity to publish entire books. The unit of discourse in Oxford of the ‘50s was not the book but the article. Reputations and careers, including Austin's and Peter's, were built on important articles. To publish an entire book was regarded as slightly pretentious, perhaps even a bit vulgar. One reason Freddie Ayer (A.J. Ayer was known to everybody in Oxford, even people who had never met him, as Freddie) was not much admired in Oxford was his penchant for publishing entire books, which were typically thought by Austin to be ‘just loose’. In any case, though he was originally educated in Oxford, and had his first professional position there, in this period he was a professor in London and not an Oxford figure.
The formality of human relations in Oxford at the time was such that there was a decisive moment when Peter first addressed me by my first name, and I answered him with his first name. Up to that time, it had always been ‘Searle’ when he was addressing me and ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr. Strawson’ when I was addressing him. The informality that apparently began in the sixties was not present in Oxford in the fifties. I am constantly astounded to see English Dons who refer to themselves as ‘Tim’ or ‘Chris’. In the fifties anything other than ‘Timothy’ or ‘Christopher’ would have been unthinkable for people for whom that was the official first name.
Oxford had a reputation for snobbishness, reserve and general coldness. Certainly there was a great deal of hatred of Americans in Oxford in particular as there was in England in general. I was on several occasions treated quite rudely solely on the grounds that I was an American. But I have to say that the philosophers I dealt with in Oxford tended to be rather nice, even sometimes remarkably nice. So, for example, once, Dagmar and I were traveling in Italy with my brother, Bill, then an undergraduate at Harvard. We were camping out in a tent, and one night we got caught in a horrendous rain storm. Getting up in the morning wet and bedraggled, I wondered who we might visit in the neighborhood to recuperate. I had heard that Isaiah owned a house in Portofino, and it was not far away. So we climbed into my ancient Citroen décapotable and drove to Portofino, where after some inquiries we found Isaiah's house. Isaiah and Aline had no idea whatever that there was even a remote possibility of our showing up, and I was in no sense a close friend of Isaiah. He was just someone I happened to know. I knocked on the door and explained the situation and they simply took us in to their house as house guests. In reflection, that does seem to me an amazing scene that they should be so hospitable. That night, by the way, Isaiah took us to dinner at a local restaurant, and we were talking about left-wing views and about communism and socialism. My brother Bill, an English major, asked quite innocently, ‘Well, what exactly is the difference between communism and socialism?’ I was hideously embarrassed that my brother should ask such a naïve question of a famous political theorist. But Isaiah did not bat an eyelash. He turned to me and said, ‘Well John, how exactly would you describe the difference?’ I mumbled a few things, whereupon Isaiah gave a short but brilliant lecture that could have been easily publishable and would have become a classic on precisely characterizing the differences between socialism and communism.
In any case, friendliness and hospitality were not uncommon. On an earlier occasion in the summer of 1956, I was traveling around Europe with Jerry Kuehl. We arrived back in Oxford exhausted, broke and bearded. We had decided not to shave for the summer, and I looked like a Dostoyevskian hero or villain by the time we got back to Oxford. College was still closed and I had no place to stay, so I simply knocked on the door of the Strawson's at 17 Banbury Road. Peter came to the door and did not recognize me. He looked me straight in the face and said ‘yes?’ I said, ‘Peter, it's me!’ I explained the situation to him, and he simply invited me into the Strawson residence. They put me in Galen's room. I think that to this day Galen must recall with some irritation the fact that he was moved out of his room simply to accommodate this itinerant, bearded friend of his father.
If I have failed to convey the friendliness of Oxford philosophy, I have also failed to convey the enormous sense of excitement. The line from Wordsworth about another series of events is the only thing apposite:
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
