Ryle was chairman of the board, the person most responsible institutionally for the dominance of analytic philosophy in Oxford. All of them except for Foot and Strawson were trained as classicists.

Three of them he counts as especially important – Gilbert Ryle, JL Austin, and Peter Strawson – but significant parts are played by AJ Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, GEM Anscombe, RM Hare, Philippa Foot, and Bernard Williams.

Krishnan tells the story through the lives of a number of individuals. But it is essential also to explain from the inside what these people were really doing, and what they found so fascinating in the problems, theories, and disagreements that occupied them, which is not easy. I understand the strategy of drawing the reader into the subject through an interest in philosophers as people, and philosophy as a human social enterprise. On the other hand, his decision to downplay the arguments and philosophical claims that are at the heart of this story, presenting them often with abbreviated samples whose interest is not always clear, makes the book less instructive than it could be.

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Indeed, some philosophy is all the more edifying for not trying to be anything of the sort.” Some philosophy can edify without meaning to. But I shall be arguing that they delivered vastly more than the little they promised. “Oxford philosophers rarely claimed to do more than clarify a couple of ideas, to make a couple of distinctions. He describes it as a “much-maligned tradition” and alludes to humanistic critics who deride its preoccupation with verbal puzzles and its avoidance of big, deep questions. Krishnan believes that the value of this movement requires defence. His education there transformed him, and this book is an expression of gratitude to a movement in Oxford philosophy that had reached its peak of development 50 years earlier, but of whose intellectual legacy he found himself the beneficiary: the “ordinary language” movement, which held that linguistic analysis was the key to resolving philosophical problems. The philosopher Nikhil Krishnan arrived in Oxford from India as a Rhodes scholar in 2007.

Language truth and logic by aj ayer