Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60

Nikhil Krishnan was moved to write what is in effect a tribute to “Oxford philosophy” because of the salutary effect an immersion in the philosophy of the period had on his own intellectual character. He believes he was “improved, morally and (one might say) spiritually” (p. 10) by being exposed not only to the discipline demanded by this style of philosophy—particularly as exemplified by its purest version, in the work of J. L. Austin—but by what he thinks is less easily, and therefore less often, discerned: its humanistic standards. The aim of his long narrative is to show that Oxford philosophy was not, as some have claimed, a sterile concern with trivial linguistic distinctions that never succeeded in resolving a single philosophical problem, but a further step in the evolution of a Socratic conception of philosophy: “one that views philosophy as concerned with the pursuit of truths through rigorous self-aware dialogue” (p. 11). …