Stuart Hampshire

Sir Stuart Newton Hampshire Template:Post-nominals (1 October 1914 – 13 June 2004) was an English philosopher, literary critic and university administrator.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite news</ref> He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.

Biography

Hampshire was born in Healing, Lincolnshire, the son of George Newton Hampshire, a fish merchant in nearby Grimsby.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite ODNB</ref> Hampshire was educated at Lockers Park School in Hertfordshire (where he overlapped with Guy Burgess),<ref>Stewart Purvia, Jeff Hulbert, Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone' (Biteback Publishing, 2016, Template:ISBN), p.6</ref> Repton School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated as a history scholar.<ref name=":0" /> He did not confine himself to history, switching instead to the study of Greats<ref name=":1" /> and immersing himself in the study of painting and literature. As was the culture at Balliol, his intellectual development owed more to his gifted contemporaries than to academic tutors. Having taken a first class degree, in 1936 he was elected to a Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford,<ref name=":0" /> where he researched and taught philosophy initially as an adherent of logical positivism. He participated in an informal discussion group with some of the leading philosophers of his day, including J. L. Austin, H. L. A. Hart, and Isaiah Berlin.<ref name=":1" />

In 1940, at the outbreak of World War II he enlisted in the army and was given a commission. Due to his lack of physical aptitude he was seconded to a position in military intelligence near London where he worked with Oxford colleagues such as Gilbert Ryle and Hugh Trevor-Roper.<ref name=":1" /> His encounters as interrogator with Nazi officers at the end of the war led to his insistence on the reality of evil.<ref name=":0" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

After the war, he worked for the government before resuming his career in philosophy. From 1947 to 1950, he taught at University College London, and was subsequently a fellow of New College, Oxford.<ref name=":0" /> His study Spinoza was first published in 1951.<ref name=":1" /> In 1955, he returned to All Souls, as a resident fellow and domestic bursar.<ref name=":0" />

In 1962 Hampshire was asked by the UK Treasury to conduct a review of GCHQ, covering technical, political, economic and strategic factors over the next ten years, including the relationship with the US National Security Agency through the UKUSA relationship. The 'Hampshire Report' set direction and funding for GCHQ for the future and put its relationship with the NSA at the centre of its growth.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

His innovative book Thought and Action (1959) attracted much attention, notably from his Oxford colleague Iris Murdoch.<ref>See Iris Murdoch 'Existentialists and Mystics' (London, Chatto & Windus 1997) A critique of Hampshire emerges most strongly in 'The Idea of Perfection', Yale Review Spring 1964</ref> It propounded an intentionalist theory of the philosophy of mind taking account of developments in psychology. Although he considered most continental philosophy vulgar and fraudulent, Hampshire was much influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He insisted that philosophy of mind "has been distorted by philosophers when they think of persons only as passive observers and not as self-willed agents". In his subsequent books, Hampshire sought to shift moral philosophy from its focus on the logical properties of moral statements to what he considered the crucial question of moral problems as they present themselves to us as practical agents.

In 1960, Stuart Hampshire was elected a member of the British Academy<ref name=":1" /> and became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, succeeding A. J. Ayer.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> His international reputation was growing and from 1963 to 1970 he chaired the department of philosophy at Princeton University<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> to which he had happily escaped from the robust atmosphere of London to which his mandarin style, conveyed in a rather preposterous growling accent, was ill-suited, as Ayer implied in his memoirs. In 1970, he returned to Oxford as Warden of Wadham College, Oxford.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> Wadham was in the first group of men-only Oxford colleges to admit women in 1974. Hampshire considered his wardenship to be one of his most significant achievements in reviving the fortunes of the college. He was knighted in 1979 and retired from Wadham in 1984, when he accepted a professorship at Stanford University.<ref name=":1" /><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

His last book, Justice Is Conflict (1999), inaugurated the Princeton Monographs in Philosophy series.

Stuart Hampshire wrote extensively on literature and other topics for The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books amongst others.<ref name=":1" /> He was head of the literary panel of the Arts Council for many years. In 1962–63, he was selected by the UK government to conduct a review of the effectiveness of GCHQ.<ref name=":1" />

He married his first wife, Renée Ayer (née Lees), the former wife of the philosopher A. J. Ayer, in 1961.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> They had a daughter by this marriage which ended with Renée's death in 1980.<ref name=":2">Template:Cite news</ref> In 1985 he married Nancy Cartwright, who was then his colleague at StanfordTemplate:Sfn<ref name=":1" /> and is now Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and at the University of California, San Diego. The couple had two daughters.<ref name=":2" />

Publications

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• Template:Cite book (Gwilym James Memorial Lecture.)
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Sources

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External links

• The Problem Of Nationalism a dialogue between Stuart Hampshire and Isaiah Berlin
• Isaiah Berlin's obituary of Stuart Hampshire final draft and revised version as published in The Times.
• Professor Sir Stuart Hampshire Daily Telegraph obituary.
• Memorial Resolution: Stuart Hampshire published in the Stanford Report (Archived)
• "I'm Going to Tamper with Your Beliefs a Little"; (1972) episode of "Logic Lane" in which Hampshire and Isaiah Berlin discuss philosophy in Oxford in the 1930s, and J. L. Austin

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