I was born in Bristol in 1933, on the Knowle Council Estate, but educated at Dursley and Cheltenham Grammar Schools, partly thanks to the Luftwaffe, but mainly thanks to the energetic efforts of my father, who had been forced to leave school at 14 in 1912 and did not wish to see me suffer the same fate.
I took my BA in philosophy at Birmingham, in 1953-6, after taking a B.Sc. there in biology. My teachers at Birmingham included Austin Duncan-Jones, one of the founders of the journal Analysis; Peter Geach, from whom I acquired a remarkable grounding in the work of Wittgenstein, which has heavily influenced everything I have written since; Bernard Mayo, who taught me logic and the philosophy of science, and Charles Whiteley, from whom I learned the history of philosophy, and whose excellent Introduction to Metaphysics I have continued for many years to recommend to students in the subject.
I followed that with an MA (1956-57) at Birmingham, on the nature of aesthetic value, which happily produced a paper that Gilbert Ryle was kind enough to accept for Mind. In that year, also, my wife and I married and our first child, Eva, was born.
In the Fall of 1957 I moved to America, to begin a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Austin Duncan-Jones’ recommendation had secured me a teaching fellowship with an actual stipend (of $1850 p.a.), which though it proved barely liveable for the three of us, did – with a bit of managing and the resilience of youth – prove liveable.
My teachers at Ann Arbor proved, if anything, even more remarkable than those I had been fortunate enough to encounter at Birmingham. I was taught moral philosophy by Wiliam K. Frankena and Charles L. Stevenson, the latter the author of Ethics and Language, a work considered by some in those far-off days to be scandalously emotivist. (Charles was amused by such reactions: I recall him once saying to me, with a grin, “I teach emotivism, you know, and if ever emotivism is conclusively refuted, I shall teach the history of emotivism”). I attended courses on philosophy of language and epistemology given by William Alston, Julius Moravczic, Paul Henle and Richard Cartwright, and on logic by Irving Copi and Arthur Burks, the latter a leading figure, in the 1940s, in the design of ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer. I retain an enormous sense of gratitude to all my teachers at both universities.
From Ann Arbor I moved, with my wife and daughter, to a teaching post at the University of Toronto in the Fall of 1960, and completed my Michigan Ph.D. from there in the summer of 1961, with a dissertation on the philosophy of language. In 1962 Austin Duncan-Jones offered me a two-year temporary lectureship at Birmingham, and we decided to move back to Britain. I needed to find a permanent post, and in 1963 was appointed to a lectureship at the newly-founded University of Sussex, where I continued to teach for almost thirty years. Sussex was congenial to interdisciplinary work, and enabled me to develop a long-standing interest in the relationships between philosophy, literature and literary theory. With the late literary critic and scholar A.D. Nuttall, the philosopher Terry Diffey and others, I was involved in the development of a Major in Philosophy and Literature, While I continued to publish on philosophy of language and epistemology – Form and Content (Blackwell,1973); Introduction to the Philosophy of language (Macmillan,1979) – I also began to produce work on philosophy and literature – Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones”: the Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto & Windus,1975); Inconvenient Fictions (Yale UP, 1992).
During these years I was also employed abroad, at the University of Cincinnati in 1967-8, and at the Australian National University Research centre in 1976. In 1978-9 I spent a year at the University of Western Australia, where I met the late Julius Kovesi, whose work greatly influenced my thinking about ethics, and in 1993-4 a year at the University of Canterbury at Christchurch in New Zealand. In 1983-84, and again in 1989 I held a visiting Chair at the University of Utah. In 1990 I accepted an offer from Utah to make my tenure of the chair (the E.E. Ericksen Chair} permanent on an annual part-time basis. In 1992 I retired from Sussex, but continued in the post at Utah. During those years my colleague Patricia Hanna and I put together her work on Kripke and Quine with my Wittgenstein-inspired philosophy of language to produce a joint work, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge UP, 2004).
At the end of 2000 I retired from Utah. I retired mainly in order to have more time to write, and did so. Books in this period included Word and World in 2004 and What is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana UP) in 2015. When a renewed antisemitism began to appear on the left of politics across the West, including Britain, I became involved with others in the effort both to expose it for what it was and to oppose it. The Resurgence of Antisemitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (NY: Rowman and Littlefield) appeared in 2006, and Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) in 2020, along with a number of articles down to the present, many of which are available below, including several jointly authored with my friend Lesley Klaff, the editor of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism,
In conclusion, one story from the Sussex years is perhaps worth telling here. It is relevant to much of the work on offer below, and though complimentary, in a somewhat backhanded fashion, to me, is very much more complimentary to Peter Geach. It concerns my views on what Wittgenstein was up to in his later work. These, while they are by no means peculiar to me (though no doubt some bits are), are far enough from many current accounts to make one wonder how closely they can reflect Wittgenstein’s intentions. In particular, I argue that the account of meaning as determined by ‘use’, developed in the later work, should be seen, not, as is commonplace today, as a rejection of Frege’s doctrine of the concept of meaning as closely dependent on that of truth, but rather as a new way of articulating that doctrine. In 1974 or 5, just after I published Form and Content, I attended one of the annual Joint Sessions (of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian society). There I encountered the late Renford Bambrough, who had then become editor of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Bambrough took me aside, bought me a drink and began to grill me at length about who I was, what I had done and where I had come from. I was puzzled by his doing so, because although I had been back in Britain for ten years, I still thought of myself as an American philosopher of sorts, and in any case very much an outsider and interloper on the domestic scene. Finally I happened to mention that I had been taught by Peter Geach. At once his face cleared. “Ah, that explains it!” he said. “Explains what?” I said, still puzzled. “Well, he said, I just read your little book Form and Content. And you show there that you understand exactly what Wittgenstein was getting at. And, of course, you are far too young to understand any such thing” (Bambrough was at that point a monumental seven years older than me). “But, of course, if you got it off Peter, there is the explanation!” I hope Bambrough was – maybe a little – wrong in attributing entire responsibility for my views to Peter, but right about their fidelity to Wittgenstein’s intentions.