At Second Story Books today, I noticed the volume Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary by Anthony Kenny. Of course I bought it. The book is organized in short chapters, each with brief notices of three persons: "Three Oxford philosophers", 'Three Wittgensteinians", "Three cardinals", and so on. Kenny's career at Oxford and elsewhere brought him into contact with many persons worth writing and reading about.
Among the Oxford philosophers is R.M. Hare, whom I have not read, but have seen quoted and referred to a certain amount. Hare's specialty was moral philosophy, which one might have expected to give him a notion of human failings. But evidently real estate had things not dreamt of in his philosophy:
Because he was now a professor, on a university, rather than a college payroll, Dick had to vacate his college house. He said that trying to buy a house was one of the worst experiences of his life: 'I had no idea that there were so many wicked people in the world!' This from a man who, as a prisoner of the Japanese, had worked on the Burma Railway!
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