Stuart Hampshire

From Philosopedia.org

Stuart Newton Hampshire [Sir]] (1 October 1914 - 13 June 2004)

Hampshire was educated at Repton School and at Balliol College, Oxford where he matriculated as a history scholar. However, he switched his interests to painting and literature and in 1936 obtained a scholarship to All Souls College, Oxford. Here, he researched and taught philosophy. Interested in logical positivism, he expanded his views by discussing philosophy with such leading philosophers of the day as J. L. Austin and Isaiah Berlin.

Hampshire wrote about literature and varied topics for the New York Review of Books as well as the Times Literary Supplement].

In 1979 Sir Stuart was knighted, and in 1984 he retired from Wadham in 1984. He then accepted a professorship at Stanford University.

Contents 1 Description 2 Obituaries 2.1 The Independent 2.2 The Guardian 2.3 The Times 3 Last Years

Description

Prof. R. S. Downie of the University of Glasgow has written of Hampshire that he was an

English philosopher with special interests in the philosophical theory of freedom and the philosophy of mind.

In the course of a long career in which he has been Grote Professor of Philosophy at University College London, a professor of several American universities, and Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, Stuart Hampshire has developed a distinctive and influential position. The key to his position is perhaps to be found in his early book Spinoza (1951), in which he explores Spinoza's conception of mind and will. These ideas were developed in much more detail in his major work Thought and Action (1959). In this book he examines a set of contrasts between that which is unavoidable in human thought and that which is contingent; between knowledge and decision; criticism and practice; philosophy and experience. These contrasts continued to occupy his thinking in several later works.

Hampshire's approach illustrated his interest in psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism. Self knowledge, he found, depends on social interaction. But human actions are determined by introspection, so he researched how a person's dispositions can be determined by introspection. We can to some degree have control over those dispositions through understanding their origins. By placing such an emphasis upon introspection, he rejected the strict behaviorism that was current, preferring Spinoza's connection of freedom and knowledge. Any theory of ethics, he held, has to understand that although human nature is genetically and historically conditioned, it also is revisable. As such, he was described as one of the anti-rationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.

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Obituaries

The Independent

The Independent carried the following 17 June 2004 obituary written by Alan Ryan:

Stuart Hampshire was one of the last survivors of the generation of Oxford philosophers who cut their intellectual and political teeth in the 1930s.

Stuart Newton Hampshire, philosopher: born Healing, Lincolnshire 1 October 1914; Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford 1936-40, Domestic Bursar and Research Fellow 1955-60; Lecturer in Philosophy, Oxford University 1936-40; Personal Assistant to Minister of State, Foreign Office 1945; Lecturer in Philosophy, University College London 1947-50; Fellow, New College, Oxford 1950-55; FBA 1960; Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic, London University 1960-63; Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University 1963-70; Warden, Wadham College, Oxford 1970-84; Kt 1979; Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University 1985-91; married 1961 Renée Ayer (née Lees, died 1980; one daughter, one stepson), 1985 Nancy Cartwright (two daughters); died Oxford 13 June 2004.

Stuart Hampshire was one of the last survivors of the generation of Oxford philosophers who cut their intellectual and political teeth in the 1930s, served in the Second World War, and for 15 years after the war dominated philosophical life in Britain and - to a considerable extent - in the United States as well. But, although he was, in that sense, an "Oxford philosopher", Hampshire was anything but the desiccated analytical philosopher of the popular legend; he was politically passionate, his thinking was as much informed by Proust and Freud as it was by the empiricist heroes of the early 20th century, and into his late eighties he wrote imaginatively and surprisingly about issues in ethics and politics as well as metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

His family was comfortably middle-class, and he was educated at a conventional public school, but in one of his last books, Innocence and Experience (1989), Hampshire gives a short sketch of the impact of the 1930s on his subsequent political allegiances that explains why he was always on the political left. During school holidays from Repton, his family would take him to lunch at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool; but outside the hotel in Lime Street would be old women offering sprigs of lucky white heather and begging. On their way back to North Wales, they would pass the deserted Birkenhead shipyards and the clusters of unemployed men whiling away time on street- corners. The contrast between luxury and misery was intolerable.

In 1933, Hampshire went up to Balliol to read Greats; even in Oxford, there were children with bare feet in the middle of winter, and everyone was aware that food was being destroyed for lack of a market while poor people were going hungry because they could not afford to buy the food they needed.

Hitler had just come to power in Germany, and it was obvious to Hampshire's generation that they were living in a pre-war period. Like many of his contemporaries, Hampshire became a lifelong anti-Conservative. One did not need to be a Marxist - and Hampshire never was one - to see that the Conservative politicians of the day would put up with any amount of aggression and brutality from Fascist governments so long as it seemed that Fascism was a bulwark against socialism and Communism and against the erosion of the privileges of the propertied.

After taking a First in Greats in 1936, Hampshire was elected to a Prize Fellowship at All Souls. His time there was calculated to reinforce his dislike of Conservatives and conservatism, since All Souls was divided between the leading lights of appeasement on the one side and young fellows such as Isaiah Berlin, J. L. Austin and the then left-wing A. L. Rowse who loathed them.

Intellectually, Hampshire was one of a small group of iconoclastic young philosophers who gathered in All Souls to discuss philosophy as they thought it should be discussed: Austin, A. J. Ayer, Berlin, Hampshire, Donald MacNabb, Donald MacKinnon and A.D. Woozley. Berlin described their discussions as the intellectual high point of his life. Their meetings continued from 1937 to 1939, but came to an end with the outbreak of war.

During the war Hampshire served as an army intelligence officer, spending four years studying the operations of Himmler's Central Command, the organisation in charge of the Gestapo and the SS, and after the war interrogating senior officials, including Heydrich's successor as head of the Central Command, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner was one of the leading figures in implementing the Final Solution, and was notorious for his interest in the different methods by which the inmates of extermination camps were to be killed. He was tried at Nuremberg and hanged in October 1946.

This prolonged encounter, combined with what had become clear about the horrors of the Soviet Union, served to persuade Hampshire that the human capacity for unmitigated evil and nastiness was quite as natural, and quite as deeply entrenched within most of us as the capacity for generosity and kindness. Like many of his contemporaries, he was appalled at the ease with which governments could recruit torturers and murderers from among perfectly ordinary people.

His dislike of what political extremism did to the characters of true believers was also increased by the revelation in 1947 that several of his friends and colleagues had been spying for the Soviet Union. Hampshire was himself the victim of some scurrilous gossip two decades later, but his outrage at the behaviour of Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt was absolutely unfeigned.

Interestingly, the effect was not only to create in Hampshire the distrust of governments armed with plans for totally remodelling their own, and often other people's, societies that so many writers felt at the time. It also led a long time afterwards to some unusually interesting insights into just how the morality of government must be different from the morality of private life, and a much deeper account than other philosophers had come up with of the tensions between public and private ethics.

Although Hampshire had never shared the hankering after revolution that drives so many Marxists, he came out of the war expecting momentous changes of some kind. Partly for that reason, he did not at once return to academic life, but served for a while in the Foreign Office. By 1947, it was obvious that the British had marched as far towards the New Jerusalem as they were inclined to go for the moment. Hampshire returned to the academy, not to Oxford but to University College London. The head of the department was A. J. Ayer; he and Hampshire were linked by a tie that in a less liberal environment might have made the appointment impossible. Indeed, it seems that in Oxford it did.

Ayer had married Renée Lees in the mid-1930s, but the marriage failed, and she and Hampshire had embarked on a relationship that lasted the rest of her life. They married in 1961 when she sacrificed her principled objections to marriage so that she and Hampshire could emigrate to Princeton; their marriage ended with her death in 1980.

A. J. Ayer's besetting sin was vanity, not jealousy. He created around him at University College London a philosophy department that could give any other in Britain more than a run for its money, and Hampshire was one of its stars from 1947 to 1950. In that year, he became a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College; in 1955, he moved to All Souls as a research fellow; and in 1960, the same year that he was elected to the British Academy, the game of musical chairs continued as Ayer moved to Oxford, and Hampshire replaced him as the Grote Professor at University College, London. There, he presided over weekly seminars that offered glimpses of an intellectual heaven where the depth of the issues discussed was matched only by the elegance of the arguments with which they were addressed.

By this time, Hampshire had written two very important books. Spinoza appeared in 1951. Spinoza did, or came close to doing, something that Hampshire admired enormously. The central metaphysical issue on which human thought seems to founder is how mind and matter, thought and the operations of mere material stuff, coexist and interact in one Nature. Today, philosophers write incessantly about the problem of consciousness, about how some parts of Nature are self-aware, act on their surroundings as well as being acted on by them. Hampshire always thought that Spinoza saw further into the answer than anyone else.

On Hampshire's view, everything hangs on the difference between the spectator's view of the world and the actor's view. The sciences are and must be committed to explaining the world from the spectator's viewpoint; but the price of their doing so is that they leave out the spectator herself or himself. In 1959, Thought and Action extended this account, arguing as Hampshire had always done that the world as it appears in thought appears as it does because of our action upon it; philosophers have always been puzzled to explain the subjective content of experience, what one might call the blueness of the amethyst as we see it. It is not only the subjective element in experience that puzzles philosophers; we are also concerned with the elusive difference between being passive objects acted upon by outside forces and active subjects who act on the world. Hampshire's originality was that he started from the side of action.

In 1963, Hampshire left London and took up a chair of philosophy at Princeton University. At this time, Princeton was the best philosophy department in the world, and Hampshire found the environment intellectually all he could wish. Aesthetically, it left much to be desired; when an English visitor commented on the neo-Gothic splendours of 1879 Hall, Hampshire observed mildly that the architecture of Princeton was perfectly hideous. This was slightly kinder than Bertrand Russell's earlier dismissal of the place as "Oxford - built by monkeys".

Hampshire's most important contribution to Princeton was, perhaps, a political one. He was there during the worst years of the Vietnam War. Princeton came close to bloodshed when students confronted the local police over the operations of the Institute for Defense Analysis and tried to keep military recruiters from the campus. Twenty-five years later, colleagues recalled Hampshire addressing an enormous crowd of faculty and students in the university's enormous gym, not only bringing cool reason to bear, but inspiring the reconstruction of the university's system of governance in a more open and more democratic direction.

In 1970, Hampshire returned to Oxford as Warden of Wadham College. Although Maurice Bowra was pleased by Hampshire's election, the college soon became a very different place from the college that Bowra had run. The new warden and the younger fellows were enthusiastic supporters of the move to co-education that Wadham led in 1974. The minutiae of college administration did not much excite him, but he was neither exasperated by them nor inattentive to details. At a time when Oxford students were belatedly emulating the Paris class of '68, he had a notably sure touch in defusing discontent.

But, he was a citizen of a wider intellectual world. In particular, he was a literary critic of genius. He had an almost uncanny ability to pick up the style of whomever he wrote about, never verging on parody, always serving the purpose of providing an empathetic understanding of what motivated - especially - Henry James, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster. It was a skill as hard to describe as it is to emulate. It gave him a particular charm as a teacher and conversationalist; he was the least aggressive of philosophers, though he could unnerve his juniors by looking slightly pained as they blundered their way forward.

After he retired from Wadham in 1984, Hampshire became Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University; in 1985, he married Nancy Cartwright, a Stanford colleague and herself a distinguished philosopher of science. They had two daughters, and Hampshire took very happily to family life - talking philosophy with a three-month-old child hung about his neck in a corduroy sling. He kept up his literary and philosophical interests to the last - indeed, his fertility of imagination seemed entirely undiminished. To the end, he remained impressed by the inexhaustibility of the insights of Spinoza. Happily, there will soon be a reissue of Spinoza, but it will reappear as Spinoza and Spinozism, containing besides the original book a short monograph that Hampshire finished a few months ago.

The other topic that preoccupied him for many years was the ineradicability of conflict. This was not, on his view, something to be regretted, nor something that philosophers could do anything about. It was a deep fact about human existence; different virtues come into conflict; different temperaments have different needs; different cultures provide some opportunities for human flourishing and suppress others. Justice is not about governments handing out benefits of one sort or another and pretending that a consensus exists where there is none. It is rather about the careful maintenance of institutions which allow differences to be ventilated and resolved, so that the losers can know they got a fair crack of the whip and the winners can understand the cost to the losers.

In his thought and his life alike, one of Stuart Hampshire's greatest strengths was his acceptance that life is a work in progress, pursued more or less fruitfully, but with no guarantees from God or Nature. His was a very distinctive voice, and its silencing is a great loss.

The Guardian

Jane O'Grady, in The Guardian (16 June 2004), wrote the following:

The Oxford philosopher Sir Stuart Hampshire, who has died aged 89, was one of those who, in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to change the nature of moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind. His Two Theories Of Morality (1977) anticipated the work of those usually credited with communitarianism, like Alasdair MacIntyre, and his Spinoza (1951) is still widely considered the best introduction to that philosopher.

If Hampshire is not as celebrated as he was in his heyday - his books Thought And Action (1959) and Public And Private Morality (1978), for instance, are no longer required reading - this is largely because he was a cautious, honest, meticulous thinker, not given to the exuberant iconoclasm of Gilbert Ryle's Concept Of Mind or of his rival A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth And Logic.

It is perhaps also because he identified himself with the the narrow technical scientistic philosophising then favoured in Britain, instead of cultivating the more diffuse continental style of philosophy, to which he was perhaps better suited. John Sparrow, the former warden of All Souls College, Oxford, always said that Hampshire was, in every respect, the opposite of what he thought himself - an impressionistic, literary thinker, rather than one of relentless scientific rigour; a man of conservative instincts, despite the radical leftwingery he espoused; very feminine rather than masculine.

Having been regarded as a golden boy at Repton school, Derbyshire, and Balliol College, Oxford - his best friend Isaiah Berlin called him "the gazelle" - Hampshire graduated with a first in greats in 1936. The same year, he was elected to a fellowship to All Souls and became a lecturer in philosophy.

He enlisted in the army in 1940, but, partly due to physical ineptitude (he had great difficulty assembling a gun), he was soon transferred from the rank of sergeant in a unit of London bus drivers to a position in army intelligence. It was his encounters, in the capacity of interrogator, with Nazi officers at the end of the war, especially with the Gestapo commander Ernst Kaltenbrunner, that led to his insistence, rare among 20th-century philosophers, on the reality of evil.

This work also led to more nuanced speculation on Hampshire's moral action. He frequently told the story of how, towards the end of the war, he had to interrogate a French traitor (imprisoned by the Free French), who refused to cooperate unless he was allowed to live. Should Hampshire, knowing the man was condemned to die, promise him a reprieve, which he was in no position to give, or truthfully refuse it, thereby jeopardising the lives of Resistance fighters? "If you're in a war," said Hampshire, "you can't start thinking, 'Well I can't lie to a man who's going to be shot tomorrow and tell him that he isn't.'"

But what the whole anecdote, and its incessant retelling, revealed was that Hampshire had, in fact, thought precisely what he said was unthinkable, and that whichever of the two decisions he finally took lay heavy on his conscience ever afterwards. Indicatively, too, it was especially loathsome to him because, although he did not say this in so many words, the traitor was almost a mirror image of himself - a cultivated young intellectual, looking like a film star, much influenced by elegant literary stylists - except that, in the traitor's case, his literary mentors were fascist.

During these wartime years, Hampshire was also tormented with suspicions about the Soviet spy Kim Philby, who worked in intelligence with him. He would pace up and down his room at Bletchley Park, saying "There's something wrong with Philby." But since he could not substantiate what this was, he did nothing about it - another theme for remorse. Ironically, long after the defection to Moscow of Philby's colleagues Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean in 1951, Hampshire himself was denounced as a spy by Goronwy Rees, another former member of that circle.

After leaving the intelligence service, Hampshire lectured in philosophy at University College London for three years, from 1947 to 1950, was a fellow of New College, Oxford, from 1950 to 1955, and domestic bursar and resident fellow of All Souls until 1960. His Spinoza book was an enormous success, selling 45,000 copies in three months, and Thought And Action also attracted much attention.

Although considering most continental philosophy vulgar and fraudulent, and contemptuous of hands-across-the-Channel "British Council philosophy", as he called it, Hampshire was much influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and thus indirectly by Martin Heidegger. But however much he hated Heidegger's Nazi sympathies, Hampshire insisted, in a Heideggerian way, that philosophy of mind "has been distorted by philosophers when they think of persons only as passive observers and not as self-willed agents".

Similarly, in his subsequent books, Hampshire was one of those who sought, like Wittgenstein's pupil Elizabeth Anscombe, to shift moral philosophy from its focus on the logical properties of moral statements - "a relatively trivial side issue" - to the crucial question of "moral problems as they present themselves to us as practical agents".

Yet while impugning Descartes' neat division of the human into mind and body, and concentrating on the more seamless "total situation", he was too human and literary to go the crass materialistic way. His devastating review of the seminal, neo-behaviourist Concept Of Mind was something for which its author never forgave him.

It is hard to know how Hampshire's academic career was vitiated by the scandal over his affair with Ayer's wife Renee, whom he married in 1961 after a divorce in which he was named as co-respondent. Even if less a matter of the dons' moral conviction than their concern over how All Souls would appear, the affair caused a massive furore and, at one point, it was only Ayer himself, who, in line with his liberalism, would give Hampshire a job (at University College London, where, in 1960, he succeeded Ayer as Grote professor of mind and logic).

Two years after the marriage, Hampshire went to be professor of philosophy at Princeton, where, as he ruefully put it, he became, like Noam Chomsky and other liberal academics, part of "the stage army of the good". Sympathetic to the student protests over Vietnam, he was chosen to be head of the teach-ins, where his debonair English rationality enabled him to carry off extraordinary diplomatic feats. He managed, for example, to silence the president of Princeton (in compliance with the rule that no one speak for more than five minutes) and, indeed, is often credited with preventing riots erupting at the university, as they had at Berkeley, in California, and Columbia, in New York.

Perhaps part of the innate conservatism indicated by Sparrow was Hampshire's firm belief in institutions. In his last book, Justice Is Conflict (1999), he argued that although justice itself was a universal principle, politicians are mistaken in thinking that they can arrive at a precise conception of what justice is. The best that can be achieved in a free, pluralist society is to perfect the procedures of justice, so that conflicting interests are fairly arbitrated.

His work as warden at Wadham College, Oxford, from 1970 to 1984, which he considered to be one of his most significant achievements, manifested and endorsed his faith in institutions. Maurice Bowra, his predecessor, had been excellent on the academic side, but the college was, in every other way, deplorably run down. Hampshire revived its fortunes; when the Shah of Iran's sister offered a large donation, it was fortunate that, although the students had a demonstration, they did not explode. Wadham got a new library, Hampshire a new qualm. But, as he said, look at the Medicis.

Yet Hampshire's was not the ambivalence of hypocrisy, but of complexity. He was always an ardent socialist, typically backing Renee's decision to give away her entire inheritance, bar a few French chairs. He and Renee managed to go on being an eccentric, non-establishment couple, even while promoting the Oxford establishment. Renee, who had always been involved in leftwing activities, insisted on periodically throwing open the Wadham garden to local children and hiring a donkey to give them rides, while Hampshire was often to be seen wrestling a donkey into his car boot in the college car-park.

In Public And Private Morality, which he edited, Hampshire spoke of the uneasy relationship between gentleness and integrity, the virtues of private life and the "hardness and deceit" necessary in public affairs. Most people, he later surmised, "feel divided between openness and concealment, between innocence and experience".

But his second wife, the philosophy professor Nancy Cartwright, whom he married in 1984, four years after Renee's death, saw his moral and political beliefs as seamlessly interwoven with his thought and action.

Politically-minded intellectuals are so rarely egalitarian and just in their private lives and loves. Hampshire's attempts at integration probably accounted for the equity and loyalty so conspicuous in both his marriages, for the great love and gratitude he inspired in his colleagues (other, of course, than Ayer and Ryle), and the depth and variety of his many friendships.

The Times

The Times published the following obituary on 16 June 2004:

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.

Last Years

Sir Stuart died at the age of 89 at his home in Oxford. Nancy Cartwright] and their two daughters, Emily and Sophie, survive him, as does a daughter, Belinda, by his first marriage, and a stepson, Julian.