A Terribly Serious Adventure

May 1, 2023
Parsing the language of philosophy. In his debut book, Krishnan, who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, brings wry wit and adroit observations to his investigation of the rise of analytic, or linguistic, philosophy at his alma mater. A department staffed by idealists, realists, and one pragmatist--F.C.S. Schiller--was shaken up by influences from near (Cambridge) and far (Vienna), and questions of meaning and language rose to new importance. "The special business of philosophy," Krishnan writes, "was to scrape away at sentences until the content of the thoughts underlying them was revealed, their form unobstructed by the distorting structures of language and idiom." Analytic philosophy, its adherents believed, would foster "particular virtues" that Oxfordians held dear: humility, self-awareness, collegiality, restraint, elegance, concision, and directness. Krishnan chronicles the transformation, and the energetic debates it inspired, by focusing on salient figures, beginning with the "pipe-chewing, no nonsense" Gilbert Ryle, who, while at Oxford, became acquainted with G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein at Cambridge and discovered Husserl and Heidegger. His classmate A.J. Ayer, "whose greatest non-philosophical interest was women," also studied in Vienna, where he encountered the American logician Willard Van Orman Quine and philosopher Ernest Nagel. �migr�s such as Isaiah Berlin, Ernst Cassirer, and Theodor Adorno brought ideas from Europe directly to Oxford. By the late 1930s, there were women involved, as well: Mary Scrutton, on scholarship; the fiery Elizabeth Anscombe, who pressed her colleagues to consider ethical consequences of their positions; the quietly sensible Philippa Foot; and the defiantly bohemian Iris Murdoch, who introduced British readers to Sartre. Beginning in the late 1950s, the likes of social critic Herbert Marcuse and New Left Review editor Perry Anderson critiqued the Oxfordians for being insular. Nevertheless, for four decades, they had carried out a formidable task: "to explain what we mean by what we ordinarily say." A lively, well-researched intellectual history.

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May 29, 2023
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.