In 2007 Nikhil Krishnan had just started studying philosophy at Oxford when a tutor asked him what a sentence in his essay actually meant. “Well, aren’t these sort of things essentially – ineffable?” he replied, affronted. Although the “linguistic turn” in Oxford philosophy had already ebbed, its method and style persisted, and for Krishnan, who had expected philosophy to be deep, mystical and oracular, it was shallow, prosaic and mired in pettifogging verbal distinctions. A Terribly Serious Adventure, his account of the heyday of analytic philosophy in Oxford, serves to explain why, over years of studying it, his “resentment” transmuted into love and loyalty, and how “Gilbert”, “Philippa”, “Peter” and “Elizabeth” stopped seeming like irritatingly clannish appellations, and became his kin.

Krishnan’s focus is “not the argument but the anecdote”, less what the Oxford philosophers were saying than “what they were doing in saying it and what their saying it brought about” – which is appropriate to philosophers who insisted that language is itself a form of activity. He begins with G. E. Moore, who, in the early twentieth century, “wielded his naivety like a dagger” to slice through then fashionable “idealism” (the view that reality is mind-dependent). How in practice, asked this patron of common sense, could idealists believe their own airy hypotheses? Can you say that time is unreal – and also that you had breakfast before you had lunch?

In 1932 Gilbert Ryle, in a paper delivered at the Aristotelian Society, argued that “bogus” metaphysical entities such as Plato’s Forms were engendered by “systematically misleading … grammatical appearances”. He sought instead “a new form of words” that would exhibit, rather than obfuscate, “the real form of the fact” in each case. He would go on, in the late 1940s, to dismiss our entrenched Cartesian notion that the mind is something other than, but inside, the body as “a category mistake” – like the error of a tourist who, having been around all the Oxford colleges, buildings and libraries, demands to be shown the university. Ryle, here wonderfully portrayed in his fusty bluntness, seems to have had little “inner life” of his own to disprove.

Preceding this work at Oxford were the ideas of the Vienna Circle, who rejected metaphysics wholesale and whose ideas were spread by their English adherent, A. J. Ayer (dubbed “the wickedest man in Oxford”). No proposition can qualify as meaningful (pronounced Ayer), let alone true or false, unless it can be empirically verified – a criterion that would render not only metaphysics, but also ethics, aesthetics, metaphor and much of what we ordinarily say, “nonsense”. But, complained the young J. L. Austin (then hatching “ordinary language” philosophy), this “Logical Positivism” was as full of “mythology and obscurity” as the “theories it purported … to demolish”. It was “secretly in love with the metaphysical enemy”, according to Moore. In Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer was erecting an overarching theory of extreme empiricism, which itself was empirically ungrounded because it failed to satisfy its own verification criterion. Anyway, said the ex-idealist Susan Stebbing, philosophy ought to be done “piecemeal”, not “seek to make everything clear at once”. Ayer’s “emotivism” claimed that ethical statements such as “murder is wrong” are not really statements at all, just expressions of approval or disapproval. But to make this claim is to adopt an absurdly detached vantage point, far removed from what anyone (presumably including Ayer) intends to say, and thinks they are meaning, when speaking of right and wrong in practice.

Ayer was right, said Austin, that much of what we say can be neither true nor false. But that is because it isn’t attempting to be. Austin urged us to look at what people use language for. Most of our utterances, he said, are not descriptive but “performative”. We “do things with words”: make a promise, name a boat, convey (in sarcasm) the very opposite of what our words, as written, mean. Language as it is actually used was Austin’s beef, but he was rigorously stringent about its usage. He, along with colleagues and students, would devote hours to detecting, and not quite solving, the puzzles in ordinary language – seeking to clarify what “we should mean” by “a game”, for instance, or by “nasty habits” as opposed to “nasty ways”, or whether we can rightly talk of having a pain in our waist. He was not universally admired, however. Elizabeth Anscombe, then a research fellow at Somerville, considered him (in Krishnan’s words), “a cutprice Wittgenstein”. Certainly Wittgenstein was arguing about language along similar, if more metaphysical, lines. Krishnan says little about him, though, given that he was based not at Oxford, but Cambridge. (In a running gag, Cambridge is referred to by its Oxford nickname, “the other place” – more suspiciously and exotically foreign than Vienna.)

Krishnan’s love of Oxford philosophy remains ambivalent. He alludes to his outsider status, having been born in India, and speaks of Englishness with combined affection and mockery. Ayer deemed the Viennese philosopher Rudolf Carnap “intellectually impressive but humourless, an unfortunate cross to bear among the English”, for whom anything smacking of depth or seriousness is suspect. The everyday life of those who created ordinary language philosophy was sequestered and elite – theirs was an Oxford of “patrician vowels”, elbow patches and smoke, badinage and indulged eccentricity, fervid discussions fuelled by tea and crumpets, but with few women in the early days. Was it “quite suitable”, wondered the Bishop of Gloucester in 1932, for an All Souls Prize Fellowship to go to a Jew?

Isaiah Berlin’s application was successful, however; and, thanks in part to the war (in which Peter Strawson and Richard Wollheim fought, and Austin was a crucial strategist), women and Jewish emigres became essential elements of Oxford philosophy. Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Anscombe and Mary Midgley (see facing page) changed the way ethics was done at Oxford, trouncing any leftover “emotivism” and toppling the ascendancy of Richard Hare’s “prescriptivism”. Disputing the “fact/value distinction” that was vaunted to be so absolute, Foot invoked examples of how we constantly breach it. In calling someone “rude”, for instance, we both describe and evaluate their behaviour. Krishnan describes how consummately polite Foot was when taking on Hare in debate in the 1950s. First she would meticulously examine his arguments. “Then the puzzled face: surely this cannot be so … Example by wily example, the clever young men would be shown to have forgotten some very obvious facts about human life.”

Nikhil Krishnan’s first impression was that Oxford philosophers confined themselves, like “well-trained bureaucrats”, to constructing faultlessly watertight, literal-minded arguments, and fobbed off the ineffable. But in time he came to see them as following in the tradition of Socrates, who insisted that “we say no more and no less than we mean”. Their strenuously subtle distinctions are in aid of an ardent attempt to capture and transfix the ineffable in precise language. Underlying their “jokiness” is a deep seriousness that seeks to catch and convey elusive truths while avoiding blather or esotericism. A Terribly Serious Adventure beautifully portrays – and exemplifies – the combined wit and profundity, exuberance and rigour, of Oxford analytic philosophy.

Jane O’Grady is the author of Enlightenment Philosophy, 2019, and the co-editor, with A. J. Ayer, of Blackwell’s Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations, 1994. She teaches at the London School of Philosophy

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS at the TLS Shop