sterile then, and I think it’s become even more awful since...It’s
really still a playing out of the linguistic turn that took hold in
Oxford in the 1940s...Allthese guys who taught me had been
taught traditional history of philosophy, Kant and Hume, and so
on, Descartes. But they dropped all of that because they heard
there was this linguistic philosophy without any historical back-
ground, so you didn’t get any sense of philosophy as an ongoing
human preoccupation, what function did it play. Instead it had
turned out into a way of solving puzzles...These guys had all
been in British intelligence in the war, so they all love to sit
around thinking up clever things to say, and that’s a pretty god-
damn sterile way of life.This panelist did not hide his poor opinion of the field during
panel deliberations. The philosopher recalls: “This [geographer] said
right out at one point that he’s had an encounter with philosophy in
Oxford back in the fifties when he was there, that had left him with
the impression that it was all just a parlor game... he seemed to be
questioning the credentials of the whole field on the basis of some
anecdotal encounters he’s had with people who did it forty years ago,
and I thought that was not professional and [not an] appropriate ba-
sis for an interdisciplinary panel.”^25
Other panelists were much more diplomatic in their view of phi-
losophy, but they too saw it as a problematic discipline. An English
scholar observes, for instance:
Although there was a huge range of views about many of the pro-
posals, I just remember time and again there would be a very
friendly, but pointed and not resolved, argument, either about a
philosophy proposal that [the philosopher] really liked and that
the rest of us couldn’t stand, or about some other proposal thatOn Disciplinary Cultures / 67