Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters With British Intellectuals

by Ved Mehta

Fly and the Encounters With British Intellectuals

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History

269 pages, Paperback

First published December 3, 2013

About the author

Indian-American journalist Ved Parkash Mehta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ved_Mehta

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

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!’

[Zak · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't help but be drawn to the infighting and rivalry of Oxford philosophers in the 20th century, even if in many ways this book could only ever consist of superficial expositions of their views, it was still fun.

I picked up this for the philosophers but the historians were also v interesting and surprisingly (for me) even less congenial than the philosophers.

Could have done with more on the Oxford female quartet (Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, Midgley), as only the first of these was taked about, and less on Ayer, Austin and Hare (boring and wrong).

[Murray Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful and somewhat entertaining narrative about one man's exploration into the philosophy of history, which he undertakes by interviewing early 20th century English philosophers and historians at Oxford and Cambridge.

A better description of this book can be found at:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a jolly romp through mid 20th century British academic intellectualism. Quick, amusing, insightful, thought provoking and well written.

[Peter Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this because the subject matter was catnip to me. Lots of fun moments and quotes sprinkled throughout, and Mehta can lift into a higher register with a good phrase or image at a good moment. But, perhaps because he tries to fit too many people in, the actual questions at issue become a bit indistinct and blurry and people are met and then left behind perhaps too quickly. A lot of the book also consists in lengthy blocks from the people profiled that read as transcribed monologues—I can understand this choice from the perspective of trying to expose the reader to the each person's actual voice, but I found myself wanting less of it (not least with his friend "John").

[Ollie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more entertaining in the historian half. More than anything it succeeded at endearing me enormously to Sir Lewis Namier

[Shadowofalok Kumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read book for all who love to know about the rivalries that exist between philosophers. Very few books reveal this exciting side of doing philosophy and history. The camps in the Anaytic British Philosophy and its subset Oxford school of philosophy were bitter rivals. On one side were Ryle, Austin etc. On the other were Ayer, Russell, Strawson etc. In history Toynbee vs AJP Taylor and Trevor roper