Colin Strang obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jan/20/colin-strang

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The philosopher Colin Strang, who has died aged 92, was a practical and effective professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He was also fertile in ideas, though always needed urging to publish.

Much anthologised is his paper What If Everyone Did That? (1960). It examines arguments that start from the premise that if everyone acted in a certain way there would be a disaster, and reach the conclusion that no one should so act.

On the face of it, such reasoning is fallacious. To take Strang’s own example, if everyone taught philosophy full-time we should all starve, but it does not follow that no one should teach philosophy full-time. Strang asks whether, if everyone behaves in the objectionable way, everyone is responsible for the disaster, and argues not: my not paying my tax does not cause an economic breakdown; that is the fault rather of those whose duty it is to prevent evasion. What, then, accounts for the apparent force of the argument?

Strang disinters the assumptions, buried in the minds of those who use it, that the burden of preventing disasters rests on the community as a whole, and an equal share of that burden rests on each member unless there is some special reason why it should not.

A lot of Strang’s published work consisted of articles in which he treated ancient philosophers almost as his own contemporaries, setting their arguments side by side with those of 20th-century philosophers, and using them as a start for developing his own original views. He was interested in the whole range of philosophy from ethics to the philosophy of science, and was a keen reader of scientific journals.

His article Tripartite Souls, Ancient and Modern (1982) is a fruitful comparison of Plato’s metapsychology with that of the American psychologist WH Sheldon. Other scholars see Plato’s trisection of the psyche as anticipating Freud’s distinction between Ego, Superego and Id, whereas Strang brings out its affinities with Sheldon’s distinction between three types of temperament, related to an individual’s physique. In The Perception of Heat (1961) he brings to bear on traditional philosophical problems some up-to-date knowledge of human physiology - of the autonomic system that maintains the optimal temperature of the brain, the sentient system that operates through changes in skin temperature, and the three distinct sets of nerve-endings employed in it.

Born in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, Colin was the son of William Strang, then second secretary in the British embassy, and his wife, Elsie (nee Jones). His father was created Lord Strang after being head of the Foreign Office, the permanent under-secretary (1949-53). Colin was educated at Merchant Taylors’ school, north-west London, and St John’s College, Oxford, where his studies were interrupted by three years’ second world war service in the Royal Artillery, serving as an officer in France and Germany. He returned to take a first in classics and philosophy (1947) and, after a year with the General Electric Company, he undertook the newly instituted Bachelor in Philosophy course (1949-51).

In 1948 he married Patricia Avis. She then had relationships with Philip Larkin and Richard Murphy. It was characteristic of Strang’s equable temperament to harbour no animosity against these poets. After lecturing at Queen’s University Belfast (1951-53) he went to what was then King’s College, Newcastle. In 1955 he divorced Patricia and married Barbara Carr, professor of English at Newcastle.

When Strang did a spell of teaching at Harvard in the 1960s, he explained to the dons there that if they took more administrative responsibility for their students the unrest of the time would cease, and he was proved right. One of his ways of getting close to the Newcastle students was to have a sort of variety show at Christmas in which the pupils wrote the sketches and the dons performed them. Strang himself on these occasions revealed a surprising talent for song-and-dance routines.

He was a first-rate electrician and mechanic. When his elderly parents came to live with him, he installed a lift in his house with his own hands. His general appearance during working hours was not that of a professor, a post he held from 1975, but of a workman come to mend something: the pockets of his clothes always had screwdrivers and pliers protruding from them.

He and Barbara had a daughter, Caroline, and a happy life together, but Barbara died when they were taking early retirement, in 1982. Two years later he married his third wife, Mary Shewell (nee Miles), an old friend who brought him five grown-up stepchildren, scattered throughout the musical world from Glasgow to the Mediterranean, and in the years until her death in 2012 he kept moving about with her to be near them.

He succeeded to his father’s title in 1978. Though he took up a seat in the Lords, he was not an active member.

He is survived by Caroline and by his grandsons, James and Daniel.

• Colin Strang, 2nd Baron Strang, philosopher, born 12 June 1922; died 19 December 2014