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The Conversation

Andrew Milne, Lecturer in Philosophy, The University of Western Australia

English philosophers thought they had sloughed off the dead weight of history, but history suggests otherwise

Oxford Hegel Leonard Woolf Bertrand Russell Lytton Strachey Cambridge Mind

Entrance to the Bodleian Library school of philosophy, Oxford. Walid Nohra/Shutterstock

Nikhil Krishnan’s intriguing and charming history, A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60, is organised around anecdotes rather than arguments. Krishnan is interested not only in “what people thought but what they were like”.

The two questions are not as separate as many assume: a penetrating portrait of a philosopher can do much to illuminate their thought.

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