Philosopher whose moral awareness was heightened by the practical demands of wartime work as an interrogator

The Guardian

If Hampshire is not as celebrated as he was in his heyday - his books Thought And Action (1959) and Public And Private Morality (1978), for instance, are no longer required reading - this is largely because he was a cautious, honest, meticulous thinker, not given to the exuberant iconoclasm of Gilbert Ryle"s Concept Of Mind or of his rival AJ Ayer"s Language, Truth And Logic.

It is perhaps also because he identified himself with the the narrow technical scientistic philosophising then favoured in Britain, instead of cultivating the more diffuse continental style of philosophy, to which he was perhaps better suited.

John Sparrow, the former warden of All Souls College, Oxford, always said that Hampshire was, in every respect, the opposite of what he thought himself - an impressionistic, literary thinker, rather than one of relentless scientific rigour; a man of conservative instincts, despite the radical leftwingery he espoused; very feminine rather than masculine.

Having been regarded as a golden boy at Repton school, Derbyshire, and Balliol College, Oxford - his best friend Isaiah Berlin called him "the gazelle" - Hampshire graduated with a first in greats in 1936. The same year, he was elected to a fellowship to All Souls and became a lecturer in philosophy.

He enlisted in the army in 1940, but, partly due to physical ineptitude (he had great difficulty assembling a gun), he was soon transferred from the rank of sergeant in a unit of London bus drivers to a position in army intelligence. It was his encounters, in the capacity of interrogator, with Nazi officers at the end of the war, especially with the Gestapo commander Ernst Kaltenbrunner, that led to his insistence, rare among 20th-century philosophers, on the reality of evil.

This work also led to more nuanced speculation on Hampshire"s moral action. He frequently told the story of how, towards the end of the war, he had to interrogate a French traitor (imprisoned by the Free French), who refused to cooperate unless he was allowed to live. Should Hampshire, knowing the man was condemned to die, promise him a reprieve, which he was in no position to give, or truthfully refuse it, thereby jeopardising the lives of Resistance fighters?

"If you"re in a war," said Hampshire, "you can"t start thinking, "Well I can"t lie to a man who"s going to be shot tomorrow and tell him that he isn"t.""

But what the whole anecdote, and its incessant retelling, revealed was that Hampshire had, in fact, thought precisely what he said was unthinkable, and that whichever of the two decisions he finally took lay heavy on his conscience ever afterwards. Indicatively, too, it was especially loathsome to him because, although he did not say this in so many words, the traitor was almost a mirror image of himself - a cultivated young intellectual, looking like a film star, much influenced by elegant literary stylists - except that, in the traitor"s case, his literary mentors were fascist.

During these wartime years, Hampshire was also tormented with suspicions about the Soviet spy Kim Philby, who worked in intelligence with him. He would pace up and down his room at Bletchley Park, saying "There"s something wrong with Philby."

But since he could not substantiate what this was, he did nothing about it - another theme for remorse. Ironically, long after the defection to Moscow of Philby"s colleagues Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean in 1951, Hampshire himself was denounced as a spy by Goronwy Rees, another former member of that circle.

After leaving the intelligence service, Hampshire lectured in philosophy at University College London for three years, from 1947 to 1950, was a fellow of New College, Oxford, from 1950 to 1955, and domestic bursar and resident fellow of All Souls until 1960. His Spinoza book was an enormous success, selling 45,000 copies in three months, and Thought And Action also attracted much attention.

Although considering most continental philosophy vulgar and fraudulent, and contemptuous of hands-across-the-Channel "British Council philosophy", as he called it, Hampshire was much influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and thus indirectly by Martin Heidegger. But however much he hated Heidegger"s Nazi sympathies, Hampshire insisted, in a Heideggerian way, that philosophy of mind "has been distorted by philosophers when they think of persons only as passive observers and not as self-willed agents".

Similarly, in his subsequent books, Hampshire was one of those who sought, like Wittgenstein"s pupil Elizabeth Anscombe, to shift moral philosophy from its focus on the logical properties of moral statements - "a relatively trivial side issue" - to the crucial question of "moral problems as they present themselves to us as practical agents".

Yet while impugning Descartes" neat division of the human into mind and body, and concentrating on the more seamless "total situation", he was too human and literary to go the crass materialistic way. His devastating review of the seminal, neo-behaviourist Concept Of Mind was something for which its author never forgave him.

It is hard to know how Hampshire"s academic career was vitiated by the scandal over his affair with Ayer"s wife Renee, whom he married in 1961 after a divorce in which he was named as co-respondent. Even if less a matter of the dons" moral conviction than their concern over how All Souls would appear, the affair caused a massive furore and, at one point, it was only Ayer himself, who, in line with his liberalism, would give Hampshire a job (at University College London, where, in 1960, he succeeded Ayer as Grote professor of mind and logic).

Two years after the marriage, Hampshire went to be professor of philosophy at Princeton, where, as he ruefully put it, he became, like Noam Chomsky and other liberal academics, part of "the stage army of the good". Sympathetic to the student protests over Vietnam, he was chosen to be head of the teach-ins, where his debonair English rationality enabled him to carry off extraordinary diplomatic feats.

He managed, for example, to silence the president of Princeton (in compliance with the rule that no one speak for more than five minutes) and, indeed, is often credited with preventing riots erupting at the university, as they had at Berkeley, in California, and Columbia, in New York.

Perhaps part of the innate conservatism indicated by Sparrow was Hampshire"s firm belief in institutions. In his last book, Justice Is Conflict (1999), he argued that although justice itself was a universal principle, politicians are mistaken in thinking that they can arrive at a precise conception of what justice is. The best that can be achieved in a free, pluralist society is to perfect the procedures of justice, so that conflicting interests are fairly arbitrated.

His work as warden at Wadham College, Oxford, from 1970 to 1984, which he considered to be one of his most significant achievements, manifested and endorsed his faith in institutions. Maurice Bowra, his predecessor, had been excellent on the academic side, but the college was, in every other way, deplorably run down. Hampshire revived its fortunes; when the Shah of Iran"s sister offered a large donation, it was fortunate that, although the students had a demonstration, they did not explode. Wadham got a new library, Hampshire a new qualm. But, as he said, look at the Medicis.

Yet Hampshire"s was not the ambivalence of hypocrisy, but of complexity. He was always an ardent socialist, typically backing Renee"s decision to give away her entire inheritance, bar a few French chairs. He and Renee managed to go on being an eccentric, non-establishment couple, even while promoting the Oxford establishment. Renee, who had always been involved in leftwing activities, insisted on periodically throwing open the Wadham garden to local children and hiring a donkey to give them rides, while Hampshire was often to be seen wrestling a donkey into his car boot in the college car-park.

In Public And Private Morality, which he edited, Hampshire spoke of the uneasy relationship between gentleness and integrity, the virtues of private life and the "hardness and deceit" necessary in public affairs. Most people, he later surmised, "feel divided between openness and concealment, between innocence and experience".

But his second wife, the philosophy professor Nancy Cartwright, whom he married in 1984, four years after Renee"s death, saw his moral and political beliefs as seamlessly interwoven with his thought and action.

Politically-minded intellectuals are so rarely egalitarian and just in their private lives and loves. Hampshire"s attempts at integration probably accounted for the equity and loyalty so conspicuous in both his marriages, for the great love and gratitude he inspired in his colleagues (other, of course, than Ayer and Ryle), and the depth and variety of his many friendships.

Nancy and their two daughters, Emily and Sophie, survive him, as does a daughter, Belinda, by his first marriage, and a stepson, Julian.

· Stuart Newton Hampshire, philosopher, born October 1 1914; died June 13 2004

三、《每日电讯报》

Professor Sir Stuart Hampshire
(Filed: 15/06/2004)

Sir Stuart Hampshire, the philosopher who died on Sunday aged 89, was one of the anti-rationalist Oxford thinkers, others being Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-war era.

Inspired by his study of the philosophy of Spinoza, Hampshire developed a description of the conditions necessary for human action, suggesting that human freedom can best be understood by examining the distinction between the declaration of what one intends to do and a prediction of what one is likely to do given one's genetic and social conditioning.

In his Ethics, Spinoza had argued that the individual could not be considered "free" if he was motivated only by causes of which he remained unaware. Genuine freedom, Spinoza suggested, comes only when we learn self-consciously to recognise the influence of our baser passions over our natures. Only then can we strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment to reason.

Developing Spinoza's ideas, Hampshire argued that concepts in moral philosophy could not be separated logically from human capacity for self-conscious introspective thought. Although he accepted the behaviourist position that a person's inclinations are the result of experiences in early childhood, and are thus partly historically and genetically conditioned, he argued that a degree of control over those inclinations - and therefore freedom of action - could be obtained through an understanding of that conditioning. Any theory of ethics, he argued, must take account of the possibility of a self-conscious decision not to follow the course ordained. Such ideas, implicitly rejecting Marxist determinism, might have seemed odd coming from someone who described himself as a socialist; and while he borrowed some of Spinoza's psychological insight, he implicitly rejected his faith in the power of reason.

Hampshire had a horror of the moral certainties of Left and Right from his time in British intelligence during the Second World War. He valued freedom over equality and rejected the classical philosophical tradition that set up reason as an absolute arbiter of disputes. Nor did he believe that liberal or socialist values had any special moral or historical significance, regarding all claims to moral universality as bogus.

His distrust of those who believe that they alone have a monopoly on truth led him to examine, in his later years, how justice could be done and seen to be done in a pluralist society. In Justice is Conflict (1999), Hampshire acknowledged that it is inevitable that people should hold irreconcilable views - on, say, the morality of warfare or abortion or even whether a motorway should be built through a beautiful valley. The popular idea that politicians should aim to find consensus on such issues, he suggested, was not only misguided but wrong. Conflict presumes the right to question authority and is a fundamental safeguard against tyranny.

Instead of consensus, Hampshire argued, a free society should aim to perfect the intermediate institutions that arbitrate between contending parties so that all sides feel, whatever the eventual outcome, that they have been given a fair hearing.

Stuart Newton Hampshire was born on October 1 1914 and was educated at Repton and at Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a First in Greats in 1936. Elected to a fellowship at All Soul's the same year, he became a lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford before serving in Army Intelligence during the Second World War.

In late 1942, working in the Radio Security Service which monitored the radio links of Nazi spies, Hampshire was said to be one of the authors of a study suggesting a growing rift between the German General Staff and the Nazi regime. Its central premise was that the war in Europe could be ended if the British government gave the German General Staff an incentive to launch a coup.

The report, endorsed by all the junior officials who read it, including Hugh Trevor-Roper (the historian Lord Dacre), was submitted for security clearance to Section-5 Deputy Chief Kim Philby who forbade its circulation, insisting that it was "mere speculation". Trevor-Roper later recalled that he and his colleagues were baffled by Philby's intransigence, though in retrospect he surmised that it was not in the Russian interest for the Western Allies to support the German opposition to Hitler while the Red Army was still too far away to gain a foothold.

Given his role in this affair, it was somewhat ironic that, during the 1980s, Hampshire himself, who had experience of both MI 5 and MI 6, was revealed to have been investigated as a possible Soviet agent, having been interviewed in 1965. He had been a friend of Guy Burgess, with whom he had worked in the private office of Hector McNeil when McNeil was under-secretary at the Foreign Office in 1945, and in the early 1960s was named as an alleged spy by Goronwy Rees, a member of the Blunt-Burgess circle and himself under suspicion. Embarrassingly for MI 5, when Rees made his allegation, Hampshire was busy conducting an in-depth review of the GCHQ eavesdropping network at Cheltenham. Although, in the end, he was cleared of all suspicion, there was embarrassment when it later emerged that MI 5 had allowed him to complete his work at GCHQ with a question mark still hanging over him.

Hampshire later recalled that in 1938 Burgess had made what seemed, with hindsight, to be a half-hearted attempt to recruit him: "He might have said something about working for peace," Hampshire said. "I thought it was just Guy going on. It was only in retrospect that I thought it might have been something more sinister."

Certainly Hampshire never showed any sympathy for Soviet Communism. In 1980 he became the founder chairman of the Jan Hus Educational Trust, a charitable foundation named after the Czech hero and martyr who in 1415 founded a movement within the Roman Catholic Church against its corruption and tyranny. Set up to "help the flow of information and the development of culture in Czechoslovakia", the trust did much to keep the spirit of independent thought alive in that country before the fall of Communism. After the war, Hampshire returned to his studies as a tutor and lecturer in philosophy at Oxford, where he spent five years as domestic bursar and research fellow at All Souls, and at University College, London, where he became Grote Professor in 1959, succeeding A J Ayer.

In 1963 he went to Princeton University and in 1964 became chairman of the philosophy department. In 1970 he was elected Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, succeeding Sir Maurice Bowra, and from 1984 to 1990 was professor of philosophy at Stanford University.

In 1951, Hampshire published his detailed study of Spinoza, whose influence is apparent in his subsequent philosophical works Thought and Action (1959); Freedom of the Individual (1965); and Freedom of Mind and Other Essays (1971).

His growing interest in the distinction between the public and private realms is seen in Public and Private Morality, which he edited in 1978, and in which philosophers discussed the question, posed most strikingly by Machiavelli, of how far the same principles can be applied to public and private morality.

He returned to the theme in Morality and Conflict (1983); Innocence and Experience (1989), in which he examined the possibility of a universal ethics based on a minimal conception of justice; and Justice is Conflict (1999).

Stuart Hampshire was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1960 and knighted in 1979.

He married, first in 1961, Renee Ayer, the former wife of the philosopher A J Ayer. She died in 1980, and he married secondly, in 1985, Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE, with whom he had two daughters.