Patrick Gardiner

Patrick Lancaster Gardiner, FBA (17 March 1922 – 24 June 1997) was a British academic philosopher and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a specialist in the philosophy of history but wrote on a wider array of topics, publishing notable studies of Schopenhauer in 1963 and Kierkegaard in 1988.

Life and work

Gardiner was born in Chelsea, London, on 17 March 1922. His father was Clive Gardiner, a landscape artist and principal of Goldsmiths College; his mother was Lilian Lancaster, an artist and a pupil of Walter Sickert. His paternal grandfather was Alfred George Gardiner, editor of The Daily News. His younger brother was the architect Stephen Gardiner.

Gardiner was educated at home until 1933 when he was enrolled at Westminster School. His contemporaries included Richard Wollheim and David Pears who became fellow philosophers and lifelong friends. As a pupil he displayed, and pursued, a passion for literature and history. He matriculated as Christ Church, Oxford in 1940 where he received a First in history in 1942.

Almost immediately after he completed his studies, he was called up into the Army and saw active service in North Africa and Italy. After being demobbed in 1945 he returned to Oxford and chose to pursue a second honours course in PPE and then further research which would become his B.Litt. thesis (1950) and his first book, The Nature of Historical Explanation in 1952. His Times obituarist writes that this work "established the concept of an analytic philosophy of history".

He was appointed as a lecturer to Wadham College, Oxford (1949), and then as a fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford (1952). In 1958, he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, where he remained until he retired as an Emeritus Fellow in 1989. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985.

He married Susan Booth (1934–2006) in 1955 and had two daughters. Schopenhauer (1963) Penguin Books Kierkegaard (1988) Oxford University Press The Philosophy of History (Editor, 1974), Oxford Readings in Philosophy Nineteenth-century philosophy (Editor, 1969) The Free Press, New York

Articles

'On Assenting to a Moral Principle', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 55 (1954-5), pp. 23–44. 'Historical Understanding and the Empiricist Tradition', in Williams, B. and Montefiore, A. eds., British Analytical Philosophy (London, 1966), p. 279 'Kierkegaard’s Two Ways' [ Dawes Hicks lecture] Proceedings of the British Academy, 54, 1968 (1970) pp. 207–229 'Error, Faith and Self-Deception', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 70 (1969–70), pp. 187–200. 'German Philosophy and the Rise of Relativism', The Monist, vol. 64 (1981), pp. 138–54.

Poetry Oxford Poetry 1947 (two poems). Edited by Martin Starkie and Roy Macnab. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1947. Oxford Poetry 1949 (one poem). Edited by Kingsley Amis and James Michie. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1949.