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A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960
Top of the pile
75
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
62/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Nikhil Krishnan
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
July 4, 2023
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. Thinkers such as Philippa Foot, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of 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.
What The Reviewers Say
A Terribly Serious Adventure is lively storytelling as sly "redescription": an attempt to recast the history of philosophy at Oxford in the mid-20th century by conveying not only what made it influential in its time but also what might make it vital in ours.
Krishnan is too generous a writer, and too careful a scholar, to allow one figure to dominate this account of half a century’s intellectual effort. It’s clear, though, that he keeps a special place in his heart for Austin.
Krishnan’s focus is "not the argument but the anecdote", less what the Oxford philosophers were saying than "what they were doing in saying it and what their saying it brought about".
Krishnan... brings wry wit and adroit observations to his investigation of the rise of analytic, or linguistic, philosophy at his alma mater.
