A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2023
A New York Times 'Critics' Pick' Book of 2023
'A real achievement' New Statesman
'Beautifully portrays - and exemplifies - the combined wit and profundity, exuberance and rigour, of Oxford analytic philosophy' TLS
A Country Life Best Book of 2023
What are the limits of language? How to bring philosophy closer to everyday life? What makes 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. In response to these events, thinkers such as Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language. Being vigilant about their words was their way to keep philosophy true to everyday experience.
A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of Oxford's most brilliant thinkers. Nikhil Krishnan brings his knowledge and understanding of philosophy to bear on the lives and intellectual achievements of a large and lively cast of characters. Together, they stood for a compelling moral vision of philosophy that is still with us today.
Autorentext
Nikhil Krishnan
Klappentext
Nikhil Krishnan arrived in Oxford from India in 2007, armed with hazy ambitions of becoming an Oxford philosopher and only a vague idea of what this entailed.
Today, the phrase conjures a bygone age of elbow patches, patrician vowels and all things figurative, oblique, or entirely ineffable. Surrounded by people for whom Michael, Peter, Iris and Gilbert were not just items in a bibliography but teachers, friends and unforgiven nemeses, Krishnan quickly learned that the work of a few dozen Oxford scholars had irrefutably shaped the English-speaking world over the course of six decades. Yet few people come away from reading the philosophy of this period with a sense of having been edified. (A fact, no doubt, that some Oxford philosophers would be proud of.)
Steeped in the dramatic history of the twentieth century, A Terribly Serious Adventure is an eye-opening look inside the rooms which changed how we think about our world.