Who and what was covered in philosophy courses at UK universities in the 1950s and 1960s?
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He says:
I’m currently writing a chapter on a radio drama of Stoppard’s called Albert’s Bridge, whose principal character is a young man fresh out of a philosophy undergraduate degree. I’m looking to see if I can find any scholarship and/or information about the history of undergraduate philosophy curricula from that time in the UK (1950s-1960s). I’ve found only a few smattering of things to that end, largely more focused at the primary (and A-levels) than universities.
If you have any information about this, please share it in the comments, as I imagine it would be of interest to more than just Dr. Ezell. Concrete information about the curricula at specific universities will be more useful than general speculations. Thanks!
And in case you’re curious, here’s a bit more about Albert’s Bridge, which was Stoppard’s first radio play, from Craig Burrell at All Manner of Thing:
Albert, a philosophy graduate casting about for gainful employment, joins a crew tasked with painting an enormous steel bridge. He likes the work so much—the feeling of satisfaction at seeing the fruits of his labours, his role in beautifying the skyline, the pleasure of clambering about high above the ground, the gratification of “doing something simple but so grand, without end”—that he decides to adopt the painting of this bridge as his life’s work. And when, as a cost-cutting measure, Clufton city council decides to reduce the number of bridge painters to one, Albert is chosen. Each coat will take eight years to apply, and when he completes one coat, he is to start again.
His young wife, caring for their young child, is concerned about his taking the job:
KATE: If you fell I’d die, Albert.
ALBERT: So would I.
But she does not anticipate the real hazard, for with each passing day that Albert spends crawling over the bridge high above the city, his unusual perspective starts to undermine his relationship to human things.
You can hear the play here.
Not curricula but possibly also useful: Brian Weatherson has compiled a frankly astonishing bibliometric history of philosophy journals (and their publication and citation patterns) in the anglosphere, in the 20th century. It’s here.
I studied philosophy at Keele from 1962 to 1966. There were in effect two departments – Philosophy and Moral and Political Philosophy. The philosophy syllabus was historical, Plato to Kant, but the main emphasis (with Antony Flew as professor) was basically linguistic – the introductory course was on Language, Truth and Logic. I certainly remember studying JL Austin.
The M&P Professor was Ernest Teale, whose background (allegedly) was as a grocer rather than an academic. However Alan Ryan was a tutor and Janet Radcliffe Richards was a student, so there was some philosophic rigour there.
Re: Albert’s Bridge. Just wow, what an astonishing metaphor for becoming a philosopher.
Something might be gleaned from the lecture lists published by the Oxford University Gazette and the Cambridge University Reporter.
The OP says: “Concrete information about the curricula at specific universities will be more useful than general speculations.”
I have neither concrete information nor general speculations, but suggestions. First, there must be official and/or unofficial histories of British universities in the relevant period that partly deal with curricula. Second, there are autobiographical and biographical writings by/about people who taught (or studied) philosophy at British universities in part of the relevant period. Ezell might look at, for instance: Ben Rogers, A.J. Ayer: A Life (2002); Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001); Nicola Lacey, A Life of H.L.A. Hart (2006); Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998). (Come to think of it, I’m not sure Berlin did much formal teaching at all.) Third, Ezell could email philosophers who were students at the relevant places in the ’50s and ’60s (some must still be alive) and ask them.
While it doesn’t get into curricula, Bernard Williams’s “Ryle Remembered” (London Review of Books, Nov. 1979) might be of interest:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v01/n03/bernard-williams/ryle-remembered
There is a bit of discussion of what Austin’s classes were like in M. W. Rowe’s recent massive biography of him, though it focusses much more on the seminars that were primarily for graduates and faculty. While he was great in small groups, Austin seems to have been a not particularly good lecturer. That surprised me a bit.
I don’t remember much about teaching in the 1950s or 1960s in either Metaphysical Animals or The Women are Up to Something; there is a lot of detail of what the classes were like for the four of them, and then on their later research, but not much on the period when they were teaching.
There is something, not a huge amount, on Murdoch’s teaching in Conradi’s biography.
I think Oxford holds the archives of several mid-century philosophers (definitely Ryle) which might include course notes. Michael Kremer not too long ago dug through the ryle archive
When I was young (Oxford, 1970s) there were archives of past examination papers. Presumably, they are still retained. The questions on these papers, like the topics on which there were lectures, should give some hints about curricula.
Ditto for Cambridge when I was young (the late seventies)
Query: What is the terminating point for this question, that is when does the ‘mid-twentieth century ‘ end?
I recommend Ved Mehta’s book “The Fly and the Fly Bottle” to get a sense of the general milieu of Oxford and London philosophy in the early 1960s.
In a similar vein, Nikhil Krishnan’s *A Terribly Serious Adventure* may be helpful. (Tom Stoppard himself has a characteristically cute blurb for this one: “Ordinary Language can hardly convey how much I loved this book.”)
An interesting question. In the case of Oxford, it would also be worth consulting the Examination Decrees and Regulations (universally known as the ‘grey books’), of which copies for each year are kept in the Bodleian.
Oxford may, though, be untypical in one important respect. I know nothing of the 50s and 60s, but in the 80s, when I was undergraduate there, the ‘curriculum’, as laid down by the central university, was very bare-bones. For each paper in Mods or Schools, the grey book did little more than specify the texts to be studied (in the case of historical papers) or the topics on which questions would be set (in the case of non-historical papers). Thus the rubric for the old Philosophical Logic paper said simply: ‘Questions will be set on truth, meaning, substance, identity, causation, etc.’ There was a reason for this: college tutors were free to teach undergraduates as they thought fit, and there was at that stage no attempt to impose a single reading list across the university. Such an attempt would indeed have been resisted: I remember comparing the reading list the Balliol tutors had given me for Philosophical Logic with that of a friend at St John’s, and discovering that, while the topics were the same, there was scarcely any overlap in the recommended reading. This meant that the questions asked in Finals had to be more open-ended than they are today.
On general grounds, I suspect that Oxford in the 50s and 60s was more similar to its 80s self than to its current incarnation. However, the picture was surely very different in universities were lectures, rather than tutorials, were the principal mode of instruction.
As a corollary to Ian Rumfit’s comment: in Oxford of the 2000s and early 2010s (I don’t know how it is now), the curricula were mostly still bare-bones but the de facto curriculum was constrained by the range of questions set by the examiners each year, which eventually I came to understand evolved by a sort of guided random walk. That is:
The exam question for each year are preserved in the Bodleian and looking at them (and also the examiners’ reports for each year, which record how many students attempted each question) will probably give a good idea of what topics were in fact being taught at Oxford in the appropriate period.
Donald MacKinnon submitted a 29-page report to UNESCO in 1953, entitled ‘The Teaching of Philosophy in the United Kingdom’, which contains representative reading lists and which was produced on the basis of a survey. There are subsections by C.D Broad, H.H. Price and H.D. Lewis. Interestingly, there is a list of texts in French and German that it is recommended should be translated into English.
MacKinnon’s report appears to be available here; https://ia601409.us.archive.org/24/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.96224/2015.96224.The-Teaching-Of-Philosophy_text.pdf
This book also contains reports on many other countries, for comparison. I was going to mention it, but you both beat me to it.
Here are some reminiscences of Oxford philosophy in the early and mid-twentieth century that readers of this blog may find amusing:
Stephen Spender (1909-95) on his encounter with philosophy at Oxford (from World within World [1951]):
I do not know whether it is usual to teach philosophy as I was taught it. In the first lesson we were told that J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism meant the greatest happiness of the greatest number and that, for Mill, happiness was the criterion of moral value. In the next tutorial we were told that Mill was wrong because he had forced himself into the position where, according to his criterion, a very happy pig might be considered morally better than a moderately happy human being. Obviously this was outrageous. Mill himself realized that it was unthinkable; accordingly he introduced standards of higher and lower kinds of happiness into his philosophy. Here he was caught out, because, if you talk of a higher happiness, your criterion which qualifies happiness is not happiness but something else. Next please. The next philosopher is Locke. We were told what he thought and then why he was wrong. Next please. Hume. Hume was wrong also. Then Kant. Kant was wrong, but he was also so difficult to understand that one could not be so sure of catching him out.
Not much had changed by the time Julian Barnes (1946-), brother of Jonathan Barnes, arrived in Oxford (from Nothing to Be Frightened Of [2008]):
At Oxford, after giving up modern languages, I studied philosophy for a couple of terms, at the end of which I was told I lacked the appropriate brain for the job. Each week I would learn what one philosopher believed about the world, and the next week why those beliefs were false. This, at least, was how it appeared to me, and I wanted to cut to the chase: what’s really true, then? But philosophy seemed more about the process of philosophizing rather than the purpose I ascribed to it in advance: to tell us what the world consists of, and how best to live in that world. Doubtless these were naive expectations . . . .
I want to extend my sincerest thanks to everyone in this comment section, and to Justin for sharing my query. This gives me more than enough to build the part of the chapter on Albert’s Bridge that makes up my book project.
These comments generally confirm what I took to be the case based on my dogged searches: “history of curricula” seems to me an undercovered, if covered at all, area in philosophy. Having been at Oxford as a visiting student in 2013, I also got the impression of a “loose” curriculum, but of course didn’t want to take my anecdotal experience as determinative of anything.
Oxford and Cambridge wouldn’t be the contextual match for Albert in Stoppard’s play. Though the locale in the play is pretty general, and the play overall has more of a “fable-like” quality where realistic details matter less, I still want to be able in the chapter on Albert’s Bridge to account for what philosophy a character like Albert would have been studying circa mid-1960s (the play debuted in 1967). Stoppard, famously, did not attend university himself, though as it came out in one tribute around the time of his death, he did take philosophy classes at the University of Bristol from a philosopher (and fellow Czech) Stephan Korner (source). He devoured a bunch of analytic and ordinary language stuff in the course of researching for Jumpers (1972), which is the play of his I’d recommend for any philosopher. (It led to a correspondence between Stoppard and Ayer, who wrote a review of the play called “Love Among the Logical Positivists” in The Sunday Times.) But, ultimately, like Albert, Stoppard got his first noted brush with academic philosophy in Bristol, not Oxbridge. The eponymous bridge is a good match for one of the suspension bridges in the Bristol area.