A TERRIBLY SERIOUS ADVENTURE

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. Émigrés 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.