Retirement with Philosophers and Friends in Cambridge: Richard Braithwaite and Margaret Masterman

Abstract

I took early retirement in 1966 and, Oxford person though I was, I went to live in Cambridge. I had become close friends with Richard and Margaret Braithwaite (Masterman) and they invited me to share their house. I also had an old mother and aunt in Saffron Walden, and needed to be with them frequently; it was a short car drive from Cambridge. Personal reasons apart, I have never regretted coming to Cambridge. Oxford is now a large city with colleges in it; Cambridge is a university and market town, and that is an environment in which I like to live. More importantly, I have felt very much at home with the Cambridge philosophers. The Philosophy Faculty is not large, and its members hold a variety of views. Oxford has a great many philosophers, and, to the outsider at least, they seem to be something of a big in-group. I except the older members, now retired or shortly retiring, Dick Hare, for instance, Michael Dummett, Jonathan Cohen. In a still earlier period Gilbert Ryle always gave me a welcome in Oxford; he was also President of the Alexander Society, the Manchester students’ philosophical club.