Background
Hampshire, Stuart Newton was born on October 10, 1914 in Lincolnshire.
Hampshire, Stuart Newton was born on October 10, 1914 in Lincolnshire.
Repton and Balliol College, Oxford, tnfts: Russell, Wittgenstein and Freud.
Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, 1936-1940 and 1955-1960. Lecturer, University College, London, 1947-1950. Fellow, New College, Oxford, 1950-1955.
Professor, University College. London. 1960-1963; Professor, Princeton University, 1963-1970.
Hampshire is an independent-minded analytic philosopher, more remarkable for the breadth ol his cultural range, the distinction of his style and an imaginative power that differentiates him from his more pedestrian philosophical colleagues than for exactness and rigour of argument. His most important book, Thought and Action (1959), signalled a return to system from the examination of minute issues at much the same time as, but in a different way from, P. F. Strawson's Individuals' Like Strawson, Hampshire sets out the preconditions of articulate discourse, which requires the capacity to identify persisting objects and to assign them to classes. He argues for a conception of the self as essentially an agent, involved in manipulative relationships with the contents of its environment, and, therefore, as necessarily embodied, and not as a mere spectator of its surroundings and of the passing scene of its own stream of consciousness. Hampshire has been much concerned with the question of the freedom of the will. Human beings are decision-making, intention-forming creatures. Self-knowledge empowers agents; it does not reveal them as impotent automata. A person’s nature is created by lns decisions; to the extent that they are real it does not constrain them. In Innocence and Experience (1989), he argues, not altogether persuasively, f°r a procedural conception of morality, according to which adequate moral judgement requires the case of all those affected to be stated and taken into account. Hampshire has written some Perceptive literary criticism and in a short essay °n aesthetics has argued that there can be no general rules of criticism since works of art are intrinsically unique. Hampshire has no obvious disciples but has been quietly influential in humanizing analytic philosophy in opposition to the general tendency of its practitioners to treat human beings as no more than rather complicated natural objects, importing into his work themes tr°ni such continental European philosophers as ■Merleau-Ponty. Not surprisingly, the manner and intent of his thinking were unwelcome to Ryle. Sources: Passmore 1957.