Who or what was Michael Oakeshott? How many of our fellow citizens — how many even of the readers of this journal — could confidently answer the question? I guess, not many.
One of the paradoxes of Britain’s intellectual history is that a country which, alongside the Greeks and the Germans, has contributed more than any other to
philosophical inquiry is extraordinarily uninterested in its own philosophers. A million people are said to have crowded the streets of Paris to see the funeral procession of Jean-Paul Sartre. In Scandanavia, Kierkegaard is a household name. In Germany, Heidegger is as well known as Thomas Mann. But in Britain no one has heard of Oakeshott — a philosopher who ranks with Sartre, Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
Like Wittgenstein, his even more intellectually powerful near-contemporary in Cambridge, Oakeshott’s idiosyncratic style matches an idiosyncratic (and truly interesting) cast of mind. His distinctive contribution came in two related insights — one in epistemology, the other in political theory.
In epistemology, he disdained dry inquiry into sense-data, truth-conditions and the rest of the usual apparatus of modern analytical philosophy, and concentrated instead on the ways in which knowledge is actually acquired — through history, science, poetry, practical wisdom and so forth.
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