Hampshire, Stuart (1914-2004)

English philosopher. In 1970 he became Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. In his best-known work, Thought and Action (1959), he argued, against Descartes, that awareness of selfhood requires that a person possess a physical body acting in a physical world.

Professor at University College, London (1960-63), and at Princeton (1963-70). Hampshire saw human action as involving freedom, in that man has some power to decide. His ethical views were influenced by those of Spinoza, on whom he wrote a book, Spinoza (1951). His interest in literature and art, and appreciation of psychoanalytic theory, lent a broad outlook to his writings.