¹ Things seemed not to have changed very much, indeed, when I returned to Oxford at the beginning of the 60s as a philosophy Fellow and tutor at Balliol. At some point during those years I found myself, together with two very senior and well-known philosophers of the time, as the third (and very junior) member of a Bodleian Library philosophy book selection sub-committee, when among the books presented to us for decision was La Voix et le Phénomène by Jacques Derrida, whose name clearly meant nothing to either of my colleagues. As one of them flicked over its pages in order to get an idea of what was inside, he noticed that one of its chapters bore the title ‘Le signe et le clin d'oeil’ (‘The sign and the wink’), saying, as he passed it over to my other senior colleague, something to the effect of ‘The Library surely won't want a book containing chapters with a title such as that in its philosophy section’. To this the other senior colleague in question immediately agreed, and if I, who happened to have met Derrida at a conference in France, had not been there to point out (rather meekly) that this book and its author had already acquired a certain importance across the Channel, La Voix et le Phénomène would not have been available to would-be readers at the Bodleian for at least some time to come.

² The Metaphysical Theory of the State (George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1918)Google Scholar

³ I remember one at the time well-known philosopher saying to me that, given that a central Kantian preoccupation was with the attempt to exhibit the strategic possibilities of synthetic a priori propositions (or, rather, judgments), and that it was now well-known that there could be no such propositions, he could see no point is expending a great deal of effort on the study of Kant.

⁴ Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), 17Google Scholar

⁵ The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London, Methuen, 1966)Google Scholar. Kant's Analytic was published, also in 1966, by Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

⁶ There were also, of course, a few – though, I think it is fair to say, only a few – later exceptions of note. One certainly worth remembering would be that of J.N. Findlay, a distinguished scholar who both taught and wrote not only on Plato and Wittgenstein, but also on Meinong, Kant and (extensively) on Hegel, as well as being both an admirer and translator of Husserl. Findlay retired from his Chair in London in 1966, from where he moved to the States, where he taught at one university or another for the rest of his life. Around the first half of the sixties at any rate I was certainly very aware of Findlay and his philosophical views, which indeed struck me as both stimulating and well worth engaging with; but this was, I have to say, a reaction from a certain distance, and my impression was and is that, for whatever reasons, he remained overall a philosophically very lone wolf.

⁷ Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Pelican Books, 1978Google Scholar), 9/10

⁸ Qu'est-ce qu'un philosophe français? – la vie sociale des concepts (1880 – 1980), Edition de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2010Google Scholar: ‘Le philosophe français constitue l'une des figures les plus remarquables de la vie intellectuelle française…[la philosophie française est] une construction conceptuelle, dont toutes les lectures et les receptions sont à prendre en compte, une institution et des pratiques sociales, de la salle de classe à la scène médiatique.’

⁹ Ibid, 23