R. M. Hare in Conversation ...
Professor R. M. Hare, on his 80th birthday, talks to Peter Momtchiloff, Commissioning Editor for Philosophy at OUP, about his own personal philosophical odyssey.
When did you first feel that ethics was your subject?
Philosophers, like poets and gardeners, are born not made. I remember from an early age raising questions which I later came to see were philosophical. But I did not at the time distinguish philosophy from religion. This confusion was encouraged by a charistmatic sixth-form master at Rugby, and lasted through my two years before the War reading classics at Balliol.
Once, on leave from the Army, I sat down at home and wrote an essay of some twenty pages on 'My Philosophy' -- a very pretentious thing to do, but pardonable, since we all thought we would be killed in the War, and I wanted to put it on record. I expanded this essay to 40 pages during the voyage to India and Malaya, but lost it with my baggage when the Japanese war started. When I was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore, I looted a beautiful ledger from the office in Changi jail, and used it to expand the essay into a book of some 150 pages, written a few pages at a time in manuscript when I had the leisure during my three and a half years in prison.
This book travelled with me on my back almost all the way to the Thai-Burma frontier. But on my retun to Balliol, when I started reading philosophy in earnest, I soon saw that my work was no good, and abandoned the idea of publishing it.
The same fate befell the second half of my dissertation on 'Practical Reason' for the T. H. Green Prize in 1950, which was an attempted short cut to objectivity on essentialist lines. This approach is still popular, but I saw it was no good. I revised the first half of my dissertation, and it formed one third of The Language of Morals, my first published book (1952). By this time I had decided that my main vocation was moral philosophy.
Which philosophers whom you have known personally have influenced you, and in what ways?
I am not easily influenced. But obviously my conversion from Russellian metaphysical monism was due to the prevailing climate in Oxford in the forties. I learnt a lot from Austin's Saturday morning seminars, which I attended regularly in the fifties, but I did not become a disciple of Austin, or of anybody else -- although I learnt a lot from many philosophers at Oxford and elsewhere.
Which philosophers from the past have you most enjoyed reading?
I seldom enjoy reading, being a very slow reader. I hate to confess all the famous philosophical works I have never read. On the whole I have found it easier to think things out for myself. Most of my reading in philosophy has been due to the necessity of teaching about works in the curriculum. But I read the whole of Plato in the Greek in preparation for my little book on him, much of Aristotle, and Kant's main ethical works -- little enjoyment there! Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Frege, and Wittgenstein were more fun.
Are there any philosophers from the past, who, in your view, exert too much influence on philosophy today?
In certain quarters attempts are made to encourage the study of continental romantic philosophers; but I have never found it of much use for the main task of philosophy: clarifying our thought about practice.
If you were a young man today, do you think you would pursue a career in philosophy?
If offered again the job of Greats tutor at Balliol, the best philosophical job in the world, I would again leap at it; but if it did not come my way, I would do philosophy somewhere else.
R. M. Hare is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford and University of Florida, Gainesville.
Interviewed by Peter Momtchiloff, Philosophy Editor at Oxford University Press
MORE TO EXPLORE
Books by R. M. Hare available from
Oxford University Press:
|
VIEW BASKET
