Hare, R. M.

Abstract

Abstract Richard Mervyn Hare (henceforth RMH) lived from 1919 to 2002. He went to Oxford, where he studied classics and philosophy. In 1938, at the time of the Munich Agreement, he decided against pacifism and joined the Officer Training Corps. He was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, and was sent to work on the Burma–Thailand railway. While a prisoner, he wrote a book, An Essay on Monism , which was never published, but is now available in the library of Balliol College, Oxford. After the war, RMH returned to Oxford to finish his degree, but, as he writes in his autobiography, there had been a revolution in philosophy as a whole in Britain, and nowhere was this more apparent than in moral philosophy. Emotivism ( see emotivism ), prefigured before the war by A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936; see ayer, a. j. ), had been developed in a less belligerent form in Charles Stevenson's Ethics and Language (1944; see stevenson, c. l. ). In RMH's first published book, The Language of Morals (1952), he proposed a return to a rational ethics in the Kantian mold ( see kant, immanuel ), acknowledging the recent developments in the philosophy of language associated with J. L. Austin and the “ordinary language” school of philosophy. It is striking that all three of the titles just mentioned contain the word “Language.” John Austin, after the war, had assembled a group of like‐minded philosophers, including RMH, who worked together to produce an account of the use in ordinary language of terms that constantly arise in philosophical discussion. Austin did not suppose that ordinary language was infallible, but he did think that it preserved a great deal of wisdom that had passed the test of centuries of experience, and that traditional philosophical discussions had ignored this resource. In his most influential book, How to Do Things with Words (1965), published after his death, he identified, as one fruit of his method, the diagnosis of what he called the “descriptive” fallacy, which is to hold that all utterances that look like statements are intended to record or impart straightforward information about the facts.