Name: Fly and the Fly-bottle
ISBN: 9780231056199

Ved Mehta

Encounters with British Intellectuals

Fly and the Fly-bottle

Gavin

Curious portraits of Oxbridge people: the ordinary-language philosophers just as they were awaking from their long radical nap, and the arsey titans of Modern history (Trevor-Roper, Carr, Taylor, Namier). The book was originally a New Yorker series, fitting their house style – gossip about the transcendental – but there’s more gossip than concepts. We get to relive all the angry Times responses to bitchy reviews, learn what Toynbee ordered for dinner at the Athenaeum in late ’62; also the hair colour of everyone involved (Murdoch ‘straight and blonde, recalling the peasant aspect of Saint Joan’). To their faces, Mehta is too much the deferential alumn, tentatively prodding the dons to be unkind about their peers. 

The humans are worth it, if you already care: Austin and Namier are tragic hubristic husks; Hare, Ayer, and Toynbee’s charisma blare straight through Mehta’s quiet journalism. 

The common point between the history and philosophy of the time is both fields' slow recovery from positivism/Wittgensteinian reductionism - the cautious return of theory, and of human posits. (In a sense Wittgenstein was still a reductionist when he was a holist, since he obsessed over language even as he denied science's entry into various sides of life.) 

Mehta has some spirit: after meeting Strawson (Snr.) he says “I took my leave of the scaled-down Kant.”; he finishes the book with this wonderful medievalism:

  Unless a philosopher finds for us an acceptable faith or synthesis – as Plato and Aristotle did together for their age, and St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant for theirs – we remain becalmed on a painted ocean of controversy, and for better or worse, insofar as the past is a compass to the future, there will never be anyone to whistle thrice for us and say, once and for all, ‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’

Fly and the Fly-bottle Encounters with British Intellectuals

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