A Terribly Serious Adventure By Nikhil Krishnan
- Narrated by: Kieran Hodgson
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Release date: 07-04-23
A Terribly Serious Adventure By Nikhil Krishnan AudioBook Summary
A lively, immersive account of the colorful and brilliant philosophers who roamed the halls of mid-twentieth-century Oxford and taught the world the importance of language
“This is Oxford philosophy in the round. The philosophical arguments, the personal lives, the colorful quotes, the elbow patches and buttered crumpets—brilliantly written.”—James Franklin, author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia
What are the limits of language? How can philosophy be brought closer to everyday life? What is a good human being?
These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience.
A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of some of Oxford’s most innovative thinkers. Far from being stuck in their ivory towers, the Oxford philosophers lived. They were codebreakers, diplomats, and soldiers in both World Wars, and they often drew on their real-world experience in creating their greatest works, masterpieces of British modernism original in both thought and style.
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