Alec Ritchie
Memories and Reflections
Alec Ritchie was one of my lecturers when I studied philosophy at the University of Newcastle, from 1964 to 1969. I did courses he conducted on Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Rationalism and Empiricism, Philosophical Analysis, Epistemology and Mathematical Logic. In 1968 with Bill Doniela he assessed a thesis I wrote on Theories of the Proposition and he was the supervisor of a Master of Arts Honours thesis I began in the following year. Apart from a brief visit to his home my contact with him was confined to the university.
When I enrolled in first-year Philosophy Ritchie was on sabbatical so I did not meet him until the following year, 1965, when he was appointed Associate Professor and then Professor. Alexander Boyce Gibson and John Passmore came to Newcastle, still only a university college at Tighe’s Hill, for the professorial inauguration. Ritchie introduced them at an informal colloquy in which Boyce Gibson and Passmore raised a few issues and fielded some desultory questions from us students. Ritchie sat between them relaxed and contented. He was a mellow fellow. And why not? At 52 he had received the highest formal recognition of his long and often demanding devotion to philosophy. We were all pleased for him.
I knew Ritchie had been a student of John Anderson’s but I did not know that he had been close to him personally or that he had taught in Anderson’s department for a while. Knowing these facts I would have been more intrigued by Ritchie’s reticence about his teacher and one-time companion. Anderson’s name was used rarely in his lectures or in his casual conversation and Ritchie gave no indication that Anderson or his ideas shaped his philosophical outlook. On one occasion, though, he did seem to tell me that Anderson should remain dead and buried. So far as I could see, Alec Ritchie was not an Andersonian.
At this stage in Ritchie’s philosophical career a hardline Andersonian would have dismissed him as an apostate seduced by the allure of modern Anglo-American philosophy, for Ritchie was given over to conceptual and linguistic analysis. He also betrayed signs of an inclination for the philosophy of commonsense and “ordinary language”.
When did the “fall from grace” begin? Not presumably when he was studying philosophy under Anderson in the early thirties. Then, according to Ritchie’s obituary, he was “deeply involved with Anderson’s philosophy and the undergraduate activities that grew up around this radical professorial figure”, and being especially interested in Anderson’s political views Ritchie had accompanied him to a union meeting in Newcastle (1)
Nonetheless, Ritchie also had a strong interest in English, for he completed his first degree with majors in both subjects. And it was with English, not philosophy, that he was professionally concerned from his graduation in 1934 until the late forties. He was in that period a teacher of English (and presumably History) with the New South Wales Department of Education. In 1941 he gained a Master of Arts degree in English. His educational work in Borneo during the war and his teaching in matriculation courses in post-war Sydney probably saw Ritchie preoccupied with the teaching of English and study skills rather than with philosophy.
But he managed to stay in touch with John Anderson and maintain his interest in philosophy, particularly pre-war. For some of the thirties he was a member of “the democratic group” formed by Harry Eddy, a resolute Andersonian, to discuss socio-political and historical matters. Around 1938-39 he was living in a flat next to the Eddys in Kirribili and was frequently in the company of Anderson. “Alec was very much devoted to Anderson”, says Madge Eddy, “and became a bit like a favourite son” (2). Sometime in the late forties a resolve was forming in Ritchie to make philosophy, not English, his profession. He worked as a part-timer in Anderson’s department before gaining in 1950 a teaching fellowship in Alan Stout’s department. In the same year he left for London to pursue a Ph.D. at Bedford College. I doubt that Anderson would have encouraged such a move. However, two of Anderson’s former students and then colleagues, might have. John Passmore had spent a stimulating sabbatical year in England from late 1947 and John Mackie had done a Greats course at Oxford from 1938 to 1940. Both had taken a dip in the big pond and were soon to move on themselves from Sydney, for promotion and opportunity.
If all ambitious philosophers must bite the hand that fed them, as David Armstrong has maintained, then Alec Ritchie was only doing what came naturally. In setting out for England he was leaving his mentor and friend and his philosophical home behind. Quite likely he was already attracted to some of the methods of analytic philosophy. At any rate, the philosophical action was “over there”. Sydney -- anywhere in Australia -- was definitely off the intellectual pace. The new ideas and the frontrunners – Ayer, Ryle, Popper – were in the Old Country. It offered the prospect of new encounters and new acquaintances, and a qualification from England would surely count for more than an equivalent one from Sydney. Having made the jump from English to Philosophy at 37 Ritchie might have heard time’s winged chariot. It was time to strike out, time to achieve.
As his obituary records, “Alec’s experience of philosophy in England provided new directions and ways in which to develop” his philosophical interests, but surely it was much more than that: it was a watershed in his life and work. The seven years overseas were probably rivaled only by his undergraduate years for the change and excitement they generated. In London he was living on the edge, or rather two edges. One was the blunt drudgery of teaching in London County Council schools; the other was the prickling excitement of philosophical discussions, the writing of his thesis and contact with the likes of Acton, Saw, Findlay, Joad, Popper and Ayer. He was not likely to be suffering from Them Sydney Blues. Like many another Australian before and after him Ritchie was making his pilgrimage to the modern heart of the language, literature and wider culture that had shaped and sustained him. The boy from Kempsey, the high school teacher with an M.A. in English and only a major in philosophy, was right in the intellectual swim, but he was not in over his head. And he was laying the foundations of a career in philosophy. In 1950 Ritchie sailed from Sydney with an Andersonian past and in 1957 returned with an Analytic future.
Ritchie told me very little about his time in England. Once he revealed that the teaching he did in London schools for a living drained and dispirited him. Maybe it was too painful a memory, for he did not elaborate on this brief statement. He was more forthcoming with a few anecdotes involving Karl Popper and A.J. Ayer. His first experience of Popper was at a postgraduate seminar in London. A Ph.D. candidate was to read part of his thesis but had no sooner finished reading the title when Chairman Popper cut in and proceeded to give his own views on the subject for the entirety of the session. The putative presenter did not get another word in, even edgewise, though he might have had something to say under his breath. On another Popperian occasion the seminar somehow reached the discussion stage and Ritchie made a remark from the floor that pierced Popper’s self-preoccupation. “The linguist’s talking about talk is like the idealist’s thinking about thought”, Ritchie commented – and thereby earned himself the privilege, when the seminar finished, of being taken by the Great Monologuist for a cup of tea in the university canteen.
The anecdote I liked most involved A.J. Ayer. He invited Ritchie to accompany him to Heathrow where Ayer was to catch a plane. As London weather would have it, a Dickensian fog descended on the city and their cab was brought to a standstill. As the world was shut out Ayer opened up. It wasn’t a sin of commission he wanted to disclose but rather one of omission. Much to Ritchie’s surprise Ayer tearfully revealed that he had been suicidal for some time because he could not find an answer to a particular Realist argument someone had presented against his phenomenalism. I don’t know whether Ritchie helped him out philosophically but the fog did lift. Ayer took off, rose to higher honours, wrote many more books and lived happily ever after, I imagine, with his theory of perception.
I had not even heard Ayer’s name when I began epistemology under Ritchie in 1965. One of the set texts was Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge but Ritchie carelessly did not refer to him in lectures as A.J. Ayer or even just Ayer. Though I used to sit close to the front and my hearing was good, I was confused by Ritchie’s saying once or twice what I took to be “frigid air”. My classmates were also confused. What did this have to do with epistemology? Somehow it eventually became clear that Ritchie was mumbling “Freddie Ayer”. So bad was Ritchie’s delivery in those lectures that one of the students stood up in class and angrily complained to him about it. He was in fact only giving vent to the irritation and frustration that we all felt. Ritchie took it badly and castigated the student for his protest or manner of protest. He was furious. It was the only time I saw him angry. He and the student met later in Ritchie’s office, after which the student withdrew from the course.
Ritchie’s poor enunciation was not his sole fault as a lecturer in those days. He did not engage with his audience. He was insufficiently mindful of its make-up and limitations. There was little eye contact and his body language was not outgoing. He was oblique rather than direct in manner. Still, these faults ceased to matter to me. I was more interested in what he had to say and in his way of doing philosophy.
Neither of these was Andersonian. An epiphany, perhaps, of Ritchie’s attitude towards Anderson was a remark he made to me in either 1967 or 1968. I was in Bill Doniela’s office one morning when Ritchie walked in briskly. He seemed a little impatient or irritated. Without looking directly at me or Doniela he declared: “Peter, I’ve just come from putting the stones back on John Anderson’s grave”. When I, and no doubt Doniela, appeared mystified by this abrupt announcement, Ritchie added: “I’ve been reading your essay”. I don’t recall that he said anything more. At that time Doniela’s room also doubled as the departmental part-time secretary’s office, and Ritchie might have been after some stationery or whatever. At any rate he left about as suddenly as he had arrived.
Both Bill Doniela and I thought it was a strange moment. Ritchie was capable of being provocative, of stirring the pot. No other colleague of his, not even Sandy Anderson, was as interested in exploring and developing Anderson’s ideas as Doniela, and among the students no one was as committed to studying Anderson as either Brian Birchall or myself. But Ritchie had looked miffed. He gave the impression that he had read something he didn’t altogether like, and I am sure he was not simply accusing me of plagiarism. In fact, as I said to Bill Doniela at the time, I could not recall saying anything particularly Andersonian in that essay. That was part of the reason for finding Ritchie’s “outburst” so surprising. I think now, as I did then, that Ritchie was expressing his disapproval of an Andersonian idea or doctrine being “resurrected”. Anderson was dead. Amen. Even if he was “having a go” at us, the spirit of his jest was anti-Anderson.
Furthermore, the remark was quite consistent with the conclusion I had already reached about Ritchie’s attitude to Anderson’s philosophy. For him Anderson seemed persona non grata. His name or his ideas rarely came up, and if they did, there was generally no endorsement. I can recall only one occasion when Ritchie acknowledged something from Anderson. It was in a lecture on Descartes. Ritchie surprised me by using approvingly an Anderson refutation of the Cogito in Studies in Empirical Philosophy. It was the exception that proved the rule. At another time, he remarked to me that Brand Blanshard and Anderson were quite similar in their philosophical thinking, although Ritchie pointed out that Anderson would have disagreed with the American’s view of necessity. It was the objectivity in Blanshard’s idealism that allowed them to be brought together. (Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis was the major text in Ritchie’s course Philosophical Analysis.)
And for me that was as far as Ritchie went explicitly with Anderson and his philosophy in the time that I was acquainted with him. Perhaps he considered that the Andersonianism in his department needed to be toned down. Until 1966 all his philosophy colleagues – Sandy Anderson, Bill Doniela and David Dockrill -- had also been students of Anderson. Dockrill, for all his evenhandedness, was not an Andersonian, but the other two would certainly have passed muster as followers, albeit with different degrees of intensity and emphasis. More generally, and allusively, I think Andersonianism was to Ritchie in his fifties what the background radiation is to the Big Bang: something diffusely present as a leftover from a volatile shaping occurrence; although muted now it is a sign that something momentous did happen once. Or, Anderson was for Ritchie rather like easy-listening music: pleasant enough as muzak but bound before long to become tedious and irritating – and needing a quick flick of the remote.
The second allusion captures more strongly the element of rejection in Ritchie’s later attitude towards Andersonian philosophy than is conveyed by the bland summations of his obituary. “The example of Anderson’s character and thought was to remain a positive influence in Alec’s understanding of the philosopher’s task even though later experience and reflection led to new orientations and modifications of the philosophy he had learnt in Sydney”. And “he never lost his respect for Anderson’s teachings but he became less interested in the imperatives of that system of philosophy and more concerned with the close study of the particularities of individual problems.”