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Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary
Cardinals, directors, dissidents, dons, judges, novelists, philosophers, prime ministers, scientists, world statesmen. . . Throughout his long and distinguished career, Sir Anthony Kenny has encountered some of the most notable and influential leaders of the post-war world.
In these brilliantly vivid vignettes Kenny offers telling and often unexpected insights into the achievements, flaws and foibles of sixty public figures - past and present - each of whom has contributed in decisive ways to our political, spiritual and cultural heritage.
In these brilliantly vivid vignettes Kenny offers telling and often unexpected insights into the achievements, flaws and foibles of sixty public figures - past and present - each of whom has contributed in decisive ways to our political, spiritual and cultural heritage.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
176 pages, Hardcover
Published September 20, 2018
About the author
Anthony Kenny
171 books116 followersSir Anthony Kenny is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 12, 2021
Snippets of encounters with philosophers, politicians, judges, etc.
Picked up to read the bits about Anscombe, Foot and Geach but the accounts of various religious and literary people were potentially even more interesting. Couldn't go into depth on many but provided a really nice summary of some interesting people.
Also it warms my heart to read someone both rave about Anscombe and rail on Dawkins, never did I think I would get both pleasures in the same book. For that reason alone it's worth a 5.
Picked up to read the bits about Anscombe, Foot and Geach but the accounts of various religious and literary people were potentially even more interesting. Couldn't go into depth on many but provided a really nice summary of some interesting people.
Also it warms my heart to read someone both rave about Anscombe and rail on Dawkins, never did I think I would get both pleasures in the same book. For that reason alone it's worth a 5.
February 18, 2023
This is a very engaging collection of vignettes of Oxford philosopher Anthony Kenny’s encounters and, not infrequently, friendships with interesting people. He was Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and later the Warden of Rhodes House, so naturally, the folk he knows move in pretty high-powered circles, some well known – Nelson Mandela, Isaiah Berlin, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Iris Murdoch, Jacques Derrida, Ted Heath, Yvette Cooper, for example – and others probably unknown to the person in the street, but familiar to those who move in academic, intellectual and public spheres – William Theodore Heard (cardinal), Bill Coolidge (benefactor), Georg Henrik von Wright (philosopher), Laurie Ackermann (judge), Denis Noble (scientist), Warwick Fairfax (businessman). Kenny organises his chapters into triplets – Three overseas philosophers, Three Wittgensteinians, Three Cardinals, Three novelists and so on – which I found made me, with my failing concentration, feel able to achieve a fair bit at a single sitting, and a single character is usually accorded about three or four pages.
Almost all Kenny’s portraits stuck me a scrupulously balanced between subjectivity and measured objectivity. Almost all indicated Kenny’s appreciation of an individual’s qualities, and, almost always, his personal affection for them (both the individual and their qualities). Only two struck me as being scathing – Charles Haughey and, with a measure of regret and pitiful bewilderment, Boris Johnson.
This book will elicit interesting reactions, I think. If you are Catholic, a lapsed Catholic, or generally interested in religious matters, you’ll enjoy Kenny’s personal religious experience and his interest in religion and philosophy. If you are interested in the way academic circles operate, you will recognize the way institutions can be both battlegrounds, peace conferences and places of convivial repartee and badinage. It is hard not to admire the energy and achievement of some remarkable people and how, on the whole and in spite of personal faults, they have often worked to try to make human society a better place.
Nevertheless, you may also, like me, feel uneasy about the writer’s being part of an establishment, an elite, for whom power and responsibility can seem strikingly separated from the everyday experience of the vast majority of society. In spite of all Kenny’s committee work on public bodies as well as in the world of higher education, the book as a whole seemed to me to represent the Ivory Tower in which many politicians, especially Conservative ones, are felt to exist. When he writes blithely of ‘feasting’ famous academics or politicians, I felt revolution round the corner. Nothing wrong with enjoying oneself and I wouldn’t want to advocate hermitic frugality as an alternative, but Varsity style moments of hedonism feel to me ones that suggest an almost total lack of awareness of the inequality by which the UK is currently beset.
Mind you, as someone on a decent pension, I don’t always feel easy myself by going out for dinner. Perhaps I should make sure that whatever the meal costs, I should then donate the equivalent to a Food Bank or the Citizen’s Advice Bureau.
Setting all that aside, as well as one or two moments when the discussion veered into philosophical elements that were totally beyond me, there is a sense in Kenny’s memoirs that he was a good man, energetic, thoughtful, remarkably good at dealing with people – he notes how often he had to engage with a left-wing Balliol JCR during the 1980s, encounters which afford him some amusing anecdotes – and spirited in promoting education for the benefit of and service to society. Even when one is wondering whether philosophers - some with bizarrely unexpected eccentricities - have any value in society, we are aware that Kenny is a man who recognizes, writes about and thereby promotes the quality of kindness. And that is, I think, a noble thing to have done in life.
Almost all Kenny’s portraits stuck me a scrupulously balanced between subjectivity and measured objectivity. Almost all indicated Kenny’s appreciation of an individual’s qualities, and, almost always, his personal affection for them (both the individual and their qualities). Only two struck me as being scathing – Charles Haughey and, with a measure of regret and pitiful bewilderment, Boris Johnson.
This book will elicit interesting reactions, I think. If you are Catholic, a lapsed Catholic, or generally interested in religious matters, you’ll enjoy Kenny’s personal religious experience and his interest in religion and philosophy. If you are interested in the way academic circles operate, you will recognize the way institutions can be both battlegrounds, peace conferences and places of convivial repartee and badinage. It is hard not to admire the energy and achievement of some remarkable people and how, on the whole and in spite of personal faults, they have often worked to try to make human society a better place.
Nevertheless, you may also, like me, feel uneasy about the writer’s being part of an establishment, an elite, for whom power and responsibility can seem strikingly separated from the everyday experience of the vast majority of society. In spite of all Kenny’s committee work on public bodies as well as in the world of higher education, the book as a whole seemed to me to represent the Ivory Tower in which many politicians, especially Conservative ones, are felt to exist. When he writes blithely of ‘feasting’ famous academics or politicians, I felt revolution round the corner. Nothing wrong with enjoying oneself and I wouldn’t want to advocate hermitic frugality as an alternative, but Varsity style moments of hedonism feel to me ones that suggest an almost total lack of awareness of the inequality by which the UK is currently beset.
Mind you, as someone on a decent pension, I don’t always feel easy myself by going out for dinner. Perhaps I should make sure that whatever the meal costs, I should then donate the equivalent to a Food Bank or the Citizen’s Advice Bureau.
Setting all that aside, as well as one or two moments when the discussion veered into philosophical elements that were totally beyond me, there is a sense in Kenny’s memoirs that he was a good man, energetic, thoughtful, remarkably good at dealing with people – he notes how often he had to engage with a left-wing Balliol JCR during the 1980s, encounters which afford him some amusing anecdotes – and spirited in promoting education for the benefit of and service to society. Even when one is wondering whether philosophers - some with bizarrely unexpected eccentricities - have any value in society, we are aware that Kenny is a man who recognizes, writes about and thereby promotes the quality of kindness. And that is, I think, a noble thing to have done in life.
October 4, 2018
As well as writing roughly fifty, mostly philosophical, books, Anthony Kenny has also been, at various times, Master of Balliol College; Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University; Warden of Rhodes House and Secretary of the Rhodes Trust; a Delegate and member of the Finance Committee of the Oxford University Press; President of the British Academy; and Chair of the Board of the British Library. He is thus clearly an eminent member of ‘the great and the good’, which David Cannadine has defined as those “men and women of high intelligence and unassailable prestige, who dutifully serve on government committees and the boards of public bodies, and who bring to the conduct of business a disinterested tone of superior wisdom and high-minded worldliness.”
‘Brief Encounters’ records Kenny’s interactions with sixty distinguished individuals: a sort of global ‘great and good’ ranging from Isaiah Berlin to Noam Chomsky and from Graham Greene to Nelson Mandela.
These are arranged in groups of three, over twenty chapters, following an introductory chapter in which Kenny summarises his life, so that the reader can assess roughly when and how these encounters occurred, although anyone wanting more information on Kenny’s life can refer to his autobiographical volumes ‘A path from Rome’ (detailing his movement into and out of the Catholic priesthood) and ‘A Life in Oxford’.
The book has a certain amount of repetition and at least two typos (“died-in the-wool” and Ken Clarke being referred to as “Kenneth Clark”). In addition some may find the picture of overlapping networks which ‘Brief Encounters’ paints all a little too cosy, whilst its pen portraits instead of offering great insights tend merely to confirm one’s preconceptions – of Macmillan’s urbanity, Heath’s prickliness, and Thatcher’s imperious manner, for example.
On the other hand, the book does represent a pleasant and easy read, which in addition to shedding a little light on its subjects, provides some interesting reflections (did Balliol fail in its teaching of Boris Johnson?) as well as some good anecdotes, my favourite being the outrage expressed by Jeremy Irons when a depiction of the eleven ages of man was abruptly reduced to six because of the manifest boredom of the Chinese dignitaries for whom it was being staged.
‘Brief Encounters’ records Kenny’s interactions with sixty distinguished individuals: a sort of global ‘great and good’ ranging from Isaiah Berlin to Noam Chomsky and from Graham Greene to Nelson Mandela.
These are arranged in groups of three, over twenty chapters, following an introductory chapter in which Kenny summarises his life, so that the reader can assess roughly when and how these encounters occurred, although anyone wanting more information on Kenny’s life can refer to his autobiographical volumes ‘A path from Rome’ (detailing his movement into and out of the Catholic priesthood) and ‘A Life in Oxford’.
The book has a certain amount of repetition and at least two typos (“died-in the-wool” and Ken Clarke being referred to as “Kenneth Clark”). In addition some may find the picture of overlapping networks which ‘Brief Encounters’ paints all a little too cosy, whilst its pen portraits instead of offering great insights tend merely to confirm one’s preconceptions – of Macmillan’s urbanity, Heath’s prickliness, and Thatcher’s imperious manner, for example.
On the other hand, the book does represent a pleasant and easy read, which in addition to shedding a little light on its subjects, provides some interesting reflections (did Balliol fail in its teaching of Boris Johnson?) as well as some good anecdotes, my favourite being the outrage expressed by Jeremy Irons when a depiction of the eleven ages of man was abruptly reduced to six because of the manifest boredom of the Chinese dignitaries for whom it was being staged.
May 25, 2020
Brief Encounters is a series of snapshots into the lives of prominent academics, religious leaders, businessmen, and novelists through the eyes if a prominent British philosopher. Its frequent forays into interesting and humorous anecdotes gives the book character and readability. A great book for Anglophiles.
December 4, 2021
“One evening, trying to understand the Catholic opposition to artificial contraception, [Nagel] put the question: ‘Elizabeth, would it be sinful if I were to play the piano with my penis?’ There was a long pause, and then Anscombe said slowly ‘An und für sich - No.’”
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews