Since the 1960s, Oxford is often associated with a particular, ‘analytic’ kind of philosophy based on a distinctively rigorous approach to the analysis of language. Is there in fact such a thing as ‘Oxford philosophy’ in this sense, and, if there is, is it worth defending? These are the questions which Nikhil Krishnan — himself an Oxford-educated philosopher who is now teaching at Cambridge — seeks to answer through a historical exploration of the development of philosophy at Oxford in the first six decades of the previous century.
In tracing the careers of a whole host of prominent twentieth-century philosophers including Gilbert Ryle, A.J. Ayer, J.L. Austin, Elizabeth Anscombe, Irish Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, R.M. Hare, and Peter Strawson, Krishnan aims not only to offer a basic overview of the philosophical developments of the period, but also to explain what these philosophers were doing in espousing their views and what effects those acts of espousal had — a decidedly Austinian approach to the interpretation of language which, according to Krishnan, represented ‘a humanistic project’ for ‘reflecting on the human condition’ that was subsequently developed in the 1960s by Quentin Skinner at Cambridge for the study of intellectual history.
At the same time, Krishnan also draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to emphasise the significance of understanding the dispositions and habits of the philosophers themselves. Accordingly, Krishnan’s is ‘a history of philosophy written as a history of people’ in which ‘the ‘basic unit of organisation is not the argument but the anecdote’, a methodological principle which makes for a highly amusing read. Implicit in this approach is the idea that philosophical thought is essentially informed by prevailing sociological conditions, and therefore one can fully understand the former only through an awareness of the latter.
While Krishnan observes that there was such a thing as Oxford philosophy, he maintains—against conventional narratives of the history of philosophy at Oxford which portray the rise of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century as the triumph of ‘common sense’ or the analytic method—that it was characterised by neither ‘shared doctrines’ nor a shared ‘methodology’, but rather ‘the particular virtues it aspired to embody’. Oxford was thus not so much ‘a school of philosophy’ as it was ‘a school for philosophers’. While these virtues include moral ones such as humility, self-awareness, collegiality, and restraint, as well as aesthetic ones like elegance, concision, and directness, Krishnan claims above all that Oxford philosophy fundamentally embodied the Socratic tradition of ‘responsible speech’ or, in other words, speech that is accountable ‘to language, to logic, to reality itself’. On this view, as Thomas Nagel once put it, Oxford philosophy was analogous to ‘a keen, shining sword’ that can serve ‘to dispel irrational beliefs and to make evident the structure of ideas’.
Krishnan concedes that there are certain features of Oxford philosophy which are ‘dead and should not be resurrected’, one of which being its linguistic and political conservatism. Nevertheless, he continues to insist that philosophy in the Oxford style embodies, in the words of Bernard Williams, ‘certain virtues of civilized thought’ which make it valuable. For Williams, the value of philosophy rests on the fact that ‘it gives reasons and set outs arguments in a way that can be explicitly followed and considered’ and ‘makes questions clearer and sorts out what is muddled’. Krishnan acknowledges that Oxford philosophy was far from unique in this respect (not least because of its debts to earlier philosophical developments at Cambridge), but he denies that the failure to be sui generis detracts from its intrinsic value.
Yet, is philosophical clarity — whatever that means — always worth defending? In certain contexts, unclarity can in fact be a virtue, as Herbert Marcuse had suggested. Indeed, in Raymond Geuss’s view, it is often ‘a good thing to have violated a given, imposed system of categories, which purportedly define clear thinking’. Furthermore, in pointing towards the opaque sociological conditions of philosophical thought and muddled entanglements between philosophy and politics, Krishnan has made a valuable contribution precisely by presenting the history of philosophy as less clearly about the development of abstract ideas within conventions of reason giving and logical argumentation that govern the discipline. His decision to align himself with the contextual approach of what has been called the Cambridge School of intellectual history has allowed him to offer a much richer understanding of Oxford philosophy as a complex and sometimes confusing set of values, assumptions, and practices embraced by philosophers in the past.