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. Thinkers such as Philippa Foot, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of 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.
A Terribly Serious Adventure is lively storytelling as sly "redescription": an attempt to recast the history of philosophy at Oxford in the mid-20th century by conveying not only what made it influential in its time but also what might make it vital in ours ... Krishnan himself is so skillful at explicating the arguments of others that at various points it seems as if he must be stating his own position. But no — he mostly hangs back, elucidating a variety of ideas with the respect he thinks they deserve.
Krishnan is too generous a writer, and too careful a scholar, to allow one figure to dominate this account of half a century’s intellectual effort. It’s clear, though, that he keeps a special place in his heart for Austin ... His historical sense is sharp as he skips, in 60 short years, across whole epochs and through two world wars ... Krishnan offers a fresh justification of a fiercely practical project, in a field outsiders assume is supposed to be obscure.
Krishnan’s focus is "not the argument but the anecdote", less what the Oxford philosophers were saying than "what they were doing in saying it and what their saying it brought about" ... Krishnan’s love of Oxford philosophy remains ambivalent. He alludes to his outsider status, having been born in India, and speaks of Englishness with combined affection and mockery ... A Terribly Serious Adventure beautifully portrays – and exemplifies – the combined wit and profundity, exuberance and rigour, of Oxford analytic philosophy.
