Reader's Digest: May 13, 2023

Ryle was chairman of the board….

Thus the irreplaceable Tom Nagel in a quietly polemical review of Nikhil Krishnan’s new book about “ordinary language philosophy,” A Terribly Serious Adventure.

The polemic takes aim at the book’s biographical mode, which Nagel finds inadequately attentive to the “arguments and philosophical claims that are at the heart of the story.” He ends by quoting with approval—and without apparent irony—Iris Murdoch’s insistence that philosophy “is not self-expression.” I built a podcast around the fact that she also wrote this:

To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.

I don’t know Nagel personally, but I would say that a certain temperament—humanistic, vaguely spiritual, attracted to mystery—inflects in his philosophical work. I take it he’d resist this reading, but I won’t get to ask him directly, since he declined my invitation to appear on Five Questions. I am still sad about that.

If Nagel…