Alan Montefiore

Alan Claude Robin Goldsmid Montefiore (29 December 1926 – 29 October 2024) was a British philosopher and Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

Background Montefiore was born in London on 29 December 1926. He was educated at Clifton College, a boarding school with a separate house for Jewish boys. Montefiore did national service as a soldier in Singapore, where he learnt Chinese.

Philosophy

Writing Montefiore's work tended to encompass the concerns and methods of both analytic and continental philosophical traditions, covering topics in moral and political philosophy, contemporary French philosophy, and philosophy of education.

A recurring theme of Montefiore's philosophical enquiries is the notion of identity. His philosophical arguments can be characterized as addressing four related concerns that, inevitably given his own Jewish origins, revolve around notions of Jewish identity. His book A Philosophical Retrospective summarizes his thinking so that the four themes become evident. The first concerns the issue of how far it may be in anyone’s meaningful power to determine the nature and implications of their own identity—not only but especially in the case of those who may be considered by themselves or by others to be Jews. The second concerns questions of how far the possession of a Jewish identity is to be seen as bound up with a relationship to Judaism as a system of religious belief and/or practice and of what might be the longer-term prospects for a purely secular Jewish identity, whether in Israel or in the Diaspora. The third theme concerns an apparent tension between Judaism’s claim to being both a religion of universal import and yet that of a historically very particular people. The final theme is Montefiore’s personal perspective as being identified as a Jew and whether or not the possession of a Jewish identity is to be understood as carrying with it the acceptance of any particular obligations as to how to order one’s life.

Other work For Montefiore, philosophy is a lived practice that entails "getting one’s feet wet".