The War -- Grice and Urmson

Speranza

Urmson is an interesting figure.

Urmson came back to Oxford after spending five or six years in a German prison camp.

Urmson was one of the British soldiers who didn’t make it onto one of the boats at Dunkirk.

Upon resuming to his career in philosophy at a very early stage, he once told people, he looked on things differently than he might have in more normal times, when he would have been five years younger.

He was more adventurous, more confident of his ability to do philosophy on his own than merely build on the last generation, and deeply suspicious of all “-isms” and overarching themes.

Urmson and the group of “ordinary language philosophers” at Oxford wanted to start philosophy over with few preconceptions about it.

And they did!