I’m enjoying Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford 1900-1960, just as earlier in the summer I enjoyed Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
The Oxford scene of the 50s in particular is alluring to me, not because I particularly prize the “What on Earth can you mean by that?!” style of discourse (a phrase associated first, I think, with G.E. Moore and later taken up by “nonsense”-spouting positivists) so much then in vogue, but just for the atmospherics of the place in those years—at least as I’ve come to imagine it.
The collective wit and cleverness of Anscombe, Austen, Ayer, Berlin, Collingwood, Foot, Hare, Midgley, Murdoch, Ryle, Strawson, Williams et al is truly impressive (when not obtuse, pedantic, and hyper-intellectualist). It would have been a thing to see, let alone participate in. I wish an ambitious filmmaker would consider tackling this subject matter. (The closest they’ve come, that I’m aware of, is the Shadowlands story of C.S. Lewis’s tragic late-life romance. Not so close, in other words.)
It should begin with a depiction of young Anscombe resisting the conferral of an honorary degree on Harry Truman, a war criminal in her judgment for dropping the bomb. That resistance was futile, but wouldn’t it make fine cinema!
I’m sure I and a couple of others would be eager to queue up for tickets.