Background
Farrer, Austin Marsden was born on October 1, 1904 in London.
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Austin Marsden Farrer
Edit ProfileEducation
Balliol College. Oxford.
Career
1935-1960, Fellow and Chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford. 1960-1968, Warden of Keble College, Oxford.
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After an early period of pantheistic Spinozism, Austin Farrer became an orthodox High Church Anglican clergyman, being described by some as ‘para-Thomist’. He sought to steer a middle course between Thomism and the Oxford philosophy of his time, aiming, as he put it, ‘to discern what kind of natural philosophy is most congenial to Christian belief’. In the context of Oxford analytical philosophy this required him, as he saw it, to defend the possibility of metaphysics, as he did in his first book. Farrcr’s central claim was that, when we examine a finite substance—including human beings—and attend to some of its universal characteristics, we are led to an oblique knowledge of the infinite God. His stress on the obliqueness of the knowledge we have of God led Farrer to give particular attention to the use ol analogy and images. D. M. McKinnon, rating this as Farrer’s ‘major work’, described it as ‘a refashioning of the Thomistic way of analogy’ >n order to find ‘the means whereby rational theology might be constructed and rendered immune from the positivist critique’. Farrer was regarded as one of the philosophically most able Christian philosophers °f his generation His influence on the intellectual life of Oxford was 'tnmense’ and extended much further afield.
