Abstract

Stuart Hampshire’s excellent memoir of Waismann in the Proceedings of the British Academy and Anthony Quinton’s introduction to Philosophical Papers give an affectionate portrait of an unworldly scholar alternately seeking to conform to British ways and then shunning them. The idioms and the pronunciation both slightly wrong his English itself witnessed to a profounder alienation. But it was an alienation much more seated in his character and life than that of most of the refugees that so illuminated British university life in the 30’s and 40’s, of whom some indeed became remarkably assimilated