[lit-ideas] Stuart Hampshire
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
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- Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 14:04:10 EDT
From the London Times:
_http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1146540,00.html_
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1146540,00.html)
Sir Stuart Hampshire
Oxford philosopher whose interest in psychology,
aesthetics and literature made for a rich brand of
humanism
The philosopher Stuart Hampshire did not generate
a coherent doctrine so much as formulate
disturbing questions and indicate the wide,
sometimes unlimited, range of considerations that
arose from them. He was not one of the dominant
philosophers of his age, and was often found
lacking in incisiveness, rigour and clarity, but
he moved in a wider intellectual world and was
aware of implications of systems of thought which
more dogmatic thinkers of greater power tended to
ignore.
He was fascinated by metaphysical questions but
rejected tidy answers such as utilitarianism or
positivism. Instead, his thinking was tentative,
literary. He valued "a certain kind of confusion",
taking into account the tragedy, individualism and
responsibilities of life. For much of his career
he put great faith in socialism, as did most of
the elite coterie in which he spun, yet he was
never a doctrinaire Marxist. In essence he was a
late-Enlightenment humanist, whose belief in the
importance of a way of life established over
generations could have come directly from Edmund
Burke.
Perhaps he understood too much to have the
ruthlessness required for parricide that marks
great pioneers in thought. Yet he was one of the
most charming, gifted and civilised Englishmen of
his time, a natural member of the intelligentsia,
and a central figure in the humanisation of
empiricism which gave "Oxford philosophy" its
special quality.
He was a fresh, subtle, imaginative and
psychologically sensitive thinker, and his best
work ranged from ethics and aesthetics to
psychology and the philosophy of mind. His
articles on philosophical topics in professional
journals were notable for a rich suggestiveness
which at times stimulated readers more than better
formulated arguments by others. And Hampshire,
with his many literary and artistic friends - from
W. H. Auden to Anthony Blunt - had much the wider
influence.
The least parochial and insular of essayists, he
also wrote a good deal on literature and other
topics for The Times Literary Supplement
(anonymously at first) and elsewhere. He was an
excellent critic - his review of Dr Zhivago, for
instance, was praised by Pasternak as the best
account of his book in English - and his literary
articles in The Listener, The Observer , the New
Statesman and The New York Review of Books were
much admired, most notably those on Henry James,
Joyce, Wittgenstein, Forster and Virginia Woolf.
He was also a contributor to Encounter, and after
the disclosure in 1967 that it had received funds
indirectly from the CIA, he was one of a group of
friends, including Isaiah Berlin and Richard
Wollheim, who discussed establishing a similar
monthly magazine. Although nothing came of those
plans, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
in 1968, Hampshire joined another group -
including Stephen Spender, David Astor and Lord
Gardiner - to form the trust which published Index
on Censorship.
Stuart Newton Hampshire was born in 1914 and
educated at Repton School, where Geoffrey Fisher,
later Archbishop of Canterbury, was headmaster.
Fisher began every morning, Hampshire recalled,
not in prayer but studying his stocks and shares.
At school Hampshire was trained as a modern
historian, and in particular the two books by
Namier on 18th-century politics in England made a
profound and lifelong impression on him. He won a
history scholarship at Balliol in 1933, but there
abandoned history for Greats, in which he obtained
an outstandingly good first in 1936.
His mental gifts, personal distinction and
striking good looks marked him out from the
beginning; he was one of the most admired Oxford
undergraduates of the day, at once a leading
intellectual, and a man of exceptional charm,
natural goodness, and a degree of moral integrity
that gave him a good deal of natural authority
among his contemporaries.
During his undergraduate years he displayed both
originality and sensibility as a student of the
arts, particularly painting and literature, which
influenced his thought in later life. His
intellectual development probably owed less to his
tutors or to established academic figures than to
highly gifted contemporaries, mainly at Balliol,
and contact with two or three dons a few years
older than himself, such as A. J. Ayer and J. L.
Austin. Introduced to Isaiah Berlin in 1935 to
talk about Kafka, he continued the conversation -
as he recalled in his eulogy in 1998 - for 62
years.
In 1936 Hampshire won a scholarship at All Souls
and decided on a career of teaching and research
in philosophy. He began as a logical positivist
and disciple of Ayer, but after a year or two he
began to move in a different direction. While he
remained a convinced naturalist, and was never
touched by religious or transcendental thought, he
became dissatisfied with what appeared to him to
be the over-mechanical concepts and formulae of
the British disciples of the then dominant Vienna
school - in particular with the atomism of Russell
and his followers, who appeared to him guilty of a
radical misunderstanding of the function of
philosophy. Part of the duty of moral philosophy,
he came to believe, was to guide practice.
His first philosophical essay appeared in 1939,
and gave evidence of unusual insight. His writing
was not as precise or rigorous as that of his
models, but at times it was a great deal more
suggestive and responsive to a wide range of human
activity, especially art, literature and
psychology.
The outbreak of war found him at All Souls; he was
a passionate socialist and a patriot, touched
neither by pacifism nor by scepticism about the
justice of his country's cause. After training in
England he was given a commission and sent to
Sierra Leone; later he was seconded to one of the
intelligence units near London, working with
Oxford colleagues such as Gilbert Ryle, Hugh
Trevor-Roper, and Charles Stuart.
In 1945-46 he worked in the Foreign Office and
then in the Ministry of Food, before being
re-elected to his fellowship at All Souls. Within
a year he was appointed a lecturer at University
College London, and in 1950 he succeeded Berlin as
philosophy tutor at New College. It was while
there, in 1951, that he published his study of
Spinoza, which remains one of the most sympathetic
and illuminating philosophical studies in modern
times of a classical thinker.
In 1955 Hampshire returned to All Souls as a
research fellow and domestic bursar, an office he
discharged with unexpected efficiency. Meanwhile
he was working on what was to be his most
important and innovative book, Thought and Action
(1959), an extended essay on the philosophy of
mind. At the heart of its argument lies an
"intentionalist" theory about the shape and
content of human experience and expression.
Attempting to profit from the in-sights of Hegel
and Freud as well as those of Wittgenstein, the
philosophers of intentionality and the linguistic
analysts, it showed Hampshire's growing interest
in psychoanalytic thought as well as his aesthetic
preoccupations. This was widely recognised as an
innovative work, and although elusive in places,
and often disdainful of logical links, it had a
wide influence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hampshire succeeded Ayer in 1960 at London
University as Grote Professor of Philosophy, but
three years later he moved to Princeton, soon
becoming known and respected among American
philosophers. He remained, though, a thoroughly
established member of Britain's great and good,
and in 1965-66 he spent several months reviewing
the cost-effectiveness of GCHQ.
In 1970 he returned to Oxford as Warden of Wadham,
in succession to his friend Sir Maurice Bowra.
Wadham had appointed college men to the post since
the 17th century, and the election of an outsider
was strongly contested but thoroughly beneficial.
A phalanx of college officers resigned in
protest - enabling a spring clean as younger dons
took over with Hampshire.
His experience of student unrest in the US was
useful as it spread to Oxford, and Hampshire, who
was sensible and reliable as well as clear
thinking, was soon being turned to for advice by
formerly rebellious students and dons alike. He
was a strong advocate of the admission of women,
not only at his own college but throughout the
university. Wadham became mixed in 1974, one of
the first group to make the change.
Despite the demands of Oxford administration -
"half dining club and half borough council", as he
once described it to John Sparrow - Hampshire was
as busy as ever intellectually and socially. He
spent Christmas 1974, for instance, with the
Annans, the Berlins and the Spenders in Jerusalem,
and published and edited several books during his
time as Warden. On retirement from Wadham in 1984
(when Sir Claus Moser took over), he accepted a
chair at Stanford in California.
In 1989 he published Innocence and Experience, a
work on political morality based to some extent on
personal experience - the nearest to autobiography
that he ever came. His last book, Justice is
Conflict, appeared in 1999.
Hampshire was elected to the British Academy in
1960, and was honoured by several American learned
societies. For some years he was head of the
literary panel of the Arts Council. He was
knighted in 1979.
Hampshire's first wife, Renée (who had previously
been married to A. J. Ayer), died in 1980. Five
years later he married Nancy Cartwright, a
distinguished philosopher of science. She survives
him, along with their two daughters and the son
and daughter of his first marriage.
Professor Sir Stuart Hampshire, philosopher and
Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, 1970-84, was
born on October 1, 1914. He died on June 13, 2004,
aged 89.
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