Philosophy at Cambridge
Newsletter of the Faculty of Philosophy
Issue 6
May 2009
From the Chairman
When I came up to Clare, there were
70 applicants to read Philosophy.
34 were accepted. That was 1985.
This year 308 applied, but just 56
were successful. This is not a blip.
Since 2002 Philosophy’s application/
acceptance ratio has been way above
the overall University average, and
higher still than the average in the Arts.
Why is Philosophy so popular? One
explanation is that the subject is now
firmly on the map in schools, as
a GCSE and A-level option, often as
a substantial element in the teaching
of Religious Studies. Over 23,000
UK students took Religious Studies or
Philosophy A-level last year, more than
French and German combined. This is
reflected in the changing intellectual
formation of our undergraduates: 2/3
of our current freshers have studied
Philosophy in some form at A-level.
But why Philosophy at Cambridge?
It doesn’t take much investigation to
discover that we offer a Rolls-Royce
education. Nowhere in the world can
match it. And it will be even stronger
this coming year when Tim Crane
and Fraser MacBride join the Faculty.
I know first-hand that they are
inspirational teachers.
Mastering facts and figures is one
of the first chores for an incoming
Chairman, but the principal pleasure
is sustaining and developing our
dynamic community. The Faculty
simply couldn’t operate without the
goodwill and superb work of its
extended network of philosophers –
Junior and Senior Research Fellows,
College Teaching Officers, Affiliated
Lecturers, Directors of Studies, not
to mention our army of top graduate
students. I’ll end this note with a
tribute to all of them.
Alex Oliver
Chairman, Philosophy Faculty Board
Emeritus Professor D.H. (Hugh)
Mellor, who in 2008 celebrated his
70th birthday, originally studied
chemical engineering at Pembroke
College. Although he had developed
an interest in philosophy at school in
Manchester, Hugh did not formally
study the subject until he visited the
University of Minnesota as a Harkness
Fellow. There he took a course on the
philosophy of science taught by the
great Vienna Circle empiricist Herbert
Feigl. Feigl began his course by
announcing that there are three kinds
of philosophy: ‘the philosophy of
nothing but’ (needless reductionism),
‘the philosophy of something more’
(mysticism and spirituality) and Feigl’s
own preferred middle way, ‘the
philosophy of what’s what’.
‘The philosophy of what’s what’
might make a good subtitle for Hugh’s
collected papers. It nicely captures
both his unpretentious, down-to-earth
attitude towards the subject, and his
respect for the facts revealed to us
by common sense and by science.
Although Hugh started off as a
philosopher of science, leaving his
job at ICI to work on his PhD on
probability with Mary Hesse in HPS,
most of his work (and certainly his
best work) has been in metaphysics.
When I wrote something for
the excellent Festschrift edited by
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra and
Hallvard Lillehammer in 2003 (Real
Metaphysics), I commented that a
dominant theme of Hugh’s work is
what I called his ‘objectivism’ about
metaphysics. This is his view that the
subject-matter of metaphysics is the
way it is regardless of what anyone
thinks about it. In the philosophy of
probability, Hugh defended single-case
objective chances or propensities; in
the philosophy of time he defended
the reality of the temporal series
ordered in terms of earlier and later,
and argued that the ‘now’ is a kind
of illusion. In the philosophy of
mind, Hugh argued against those
like Thomas Nagel who think that the
self is something outside the objective
order of the world. Our metaphysics
should not mix facts about the way
we represent the phenomena with
the phenomena themselves.
This is perhaps more of a
‘philosophy of philosophy’ than you
would get from Hugh himself. Hugh
tended to be impatient with people
who speculated about the essence of
philosophy, thinking this a question
of as little interest as the question
of the essence of science. “I’m not
interested in philosophy” he would
sometimes say “I’m interested in
time, causation, probability, the
mind …”. Philosophy is its own
thing: there is truth and falsehood in
philosophy; the truth can be attained;
and our philosophical questions are,
on the whole, about exactly what they
seem to be about: time, causation,
probability, the mind and so on.
D.H. Mellor
Tim Crane
D.H. Mellor
Philosophy at Cambridge page 2 May 2009
When I was a research student
in the 1980s, Hugh was one of the
dominant figures in the Cambridge
scene. Tireless, tough and energetic
as a graduate supervisor, he also gave
inspiring undergraduate lectures and
he was a formidable opponent at the
Moral Sciences Club. Many visiting
speakers came away from meetings
with their papers in severe need of
reconstruction (I know that mine
did). We coined the Philosophers’
Lexicon-style definition: hughmellorate
(verb, transitive) = to show a visiting
speaker that their paper is completely
worthless. But Hugh did not do this
to score points; he wanted to get to
the heart of the matter, without any
waffle and without affectation.
Some found Hugh just too dogmatic
in those days, and even those who
didn’t would sometimes poke fun at
him affectionately. I remember Jeremy
Butterfield in a lecture describing a view
about time as what Hugh believes, and
adding: “He won’t tell you he believes
it. He’ll tell you it’s true. That’s his way
of saying he believes it”. And a friend
summed up Hugh’s inaugural lecture,
The Warrant of Induction in two
sentences: “How do we know the future
will be like the past? Because it will!”.
It was odd, in a way, that Hugh
should give his inaugural lecture on
epistemology, which is not an area
of philosophy in which he had much
interest. The inaugural is a fine piece,
but his greatest achievements have
been in metaphysics: in particular in
the philosophy of time (Real Time
was published in 1980, and the heavily
revised version Real Time II in 1998)
and in causation, where his dense
and condensed book The Facts of
Causation (1995) argued for some
very radical doctrines, for example
the view that causation is not a
relation. These works surely belong
among the best works of metaphysics
of the late twentieth century.
Hugh’s work in metaphysics fits
squarely into a Cambridge tradition
which is hard to define but easy
to recognise – a tradition which in
the 20th century included Bertrand
Russell, F.P. Ramsey, C.D. Broad and
R.B. Braithwaite. Hugh has always
said how much he owed to Ramsey,
but he also owed a lot to Ramsey’s
friend Braithwaite, who would also
become a friend of Hugh’s. He also
claims as his other influences Hans
Reichenbach, and the Australian
metaphysics of J.J.C. Smart, D.M.
Armstrong, Frank Jackson and
David Lewis.
Hugh’s substantial achievements in
philosophy should not over-shadow
the enormous amount he has also
done for the Faculty and the
University. He was the prime mover
in the ambitious redesign of the Raised
Faculty Building, and he also served as
Pro-Vice Chancellor, managing to do
at least three times as many things in
a day than most academics. Since he
retired, Hugh has taken a well-earned
break from all this kind of thing
(though not from philosophy, publishing
his philosophical introduction to
probability a few years ago) and has
been spending more and more time
on his other great passion, the theatre.
To his students, Hugh is a model
of how to take philosophy seriously
without being solemn about it;
how to have high standards in the
subject without being crippled by
the enormity of the problems or
the weight of the tradition; how to
take account of the known facts
without slavish devotion to science;
and how the first and guiding aim of
philosophers should be to aim to say
what is true, without fuss and without
obscurity. The philosophy of what’s
what, in other words.
Tim Crane (PhD 1989), Professor
of Philosophy, UCL. He joins the
Faculty as Knightbridge Professor
in September 2009