G.R.G. Mure as Hegelian Scholar

Abstract

Geoffrey Mure, who died on 24 May 1979 at the age of 86, owed his original interest in Hegel, and indeed the greater part of his philosophical education, to his Merton tutor H.H. Joachim, later Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. Joachim was an accomplished philosophical scholar who did distinguished work on Aristotle and Spinoza, approaching both from a point of view which was broadly Hegelian; he was also the author of a short but powerful book on the Coherence theory of truth. The book was welcomed by some critics of the current idealism, including Russell, because it said that the Coherence theory ended in shipwreck. But it was certainly never Joachim's intention to suggest that, because of his criticisms, idealism should be abandoned. What he wanted, and what Mure wanted after him, was to strengthen that philosophy by eliminating residual elements of false doctrine which (they thought) survived in the versions of it put out by F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet; to do that it was necessary to make explicit appeal to Hegel. It must be emphasised that, for Joachim and Mure alike, idealism was the only serious possibility in philosophy; realism, empiricism and naturalism, its various antitheses, were hardly worth serious consideration. One third that weakened Mure's thought, and made his defence of his own doctrine less impressive than it might have been, was that he knew so little about his opponents. True, when he wrote Retreat from Truth in the 1950s he made a serious if not wholly successful attempt to grasp and grapple with certain theories of Russell, for whom he had always had an admiration. But though he pontificated a good deal on the subject of modern philosophy in that book and elsewhere, he never managed to study it very closely. Joachim had convinced him in advance that views of a certain sort could never be true, which meant of course that they could be dismissed without a hearing.