A friend at Cambridge has forwarded the London Times obituary, which is not accessible without a subscription outside the UK. As my friend wrote: "As you'll see, it manages -- in a typically British fashion -- to be both effusively laudatory and quite derogatory. The remark about Geoffrey Fisher is priceless."
Some excerpts:
"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....
"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....
"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....
"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....
"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....
"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."
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