The following two articles commemorate the distinguished British Hegelian philosopher and scholar, who died last year. The first is the text of the Address given on 6 October 1979 at the Memorial Service for G.R.G. Mure in the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford (the College where he was first Tutor in Philosophy and Fellow, and then Warden). The author, Lord Trend, was a pupil of Mure at Merton and ended a distinguished career in the civil service as the Secretary to the British Cabinet. He is now Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford.

The second article was specially written for the Bulletin by W.H. Walsh, who succeeded Mure as Tutor in Philosophy at Merton. W.H. Walsh has kindly agreed to prepare a bibliography of Mure's writings for the Autumn/Winter issue of the Bulletin.

I had left Oxford a good many years before Geoffrey Mure became the Warden of Merton; and he had retired before I returned to the University. During his Wardenship I was able to see much less of him, and of the College, than I would have wished; and I am far less qualified than many others to speak of the debt which Merton owes him for the sixteen years in which he presided over its fortunes. I know that the debt was very great, no less great than the pride which he himself felt in discharging the Warden's office; but I must leave it to others, at other times and in other ways, to bear witness in detail to the nature, and the scope, of the many services which he, and his wife Molly, rendered this House. I want now simply to try to pay a tribute, of love, admiration and gratitude, to the man himself, a man to whom I, in common with so many others, owe so much, a man from whom I learned, genuinely learned, as from nobody else in my life. Inevitably, this must be largely a matter of personal recollection. But everybody will have brought his own memories of Geoffrey to this memorial service; and, if my words help to quicken those memories into fresh life, perhaps the picture which we shall construct between us will be the memorial which he himself would have most wished to have.

Geoffrey Mure, who died on 24 May 1979 at the age of 86, owed his original interest in Hegel, and indeed the greater part of his philosophical education, to his Merton tutor H.H. Joachim, later Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. Joachim was an accomplished philosophical scholar who did distinguished work on Aristotle and Spinoza, approaching both from a point of view which was broadly Hegelian; he was also the author of a short but powerful book on the Coherence theory of truth. The book was welcomed by some critics of the current idealism, including Russell, because it said that the Coherence theory ended in shipwreck. But it was certainly never Joachim's intention to suggest that, because of his criticisms, idealism should be abandoned. What he wanted, and what Mure wanted after him, was to strengthen that philosophy by eliminating residual elements of false doctrine which (they thought) survived in the versions of it put out by F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet; to do that it was necessary to make explicit appeal to Hegel. It must be emphasised that, for Joachim and Mure alike, idealism was the only serious possibility in philosophy; realism, empiricism and naturalism, its various antitheses, were hardly worth serious consideration. One third that weakened Mure's thought, and made his defence of his own doctrine less impressive than it might have been, was that he knew so little about his opponents. True, when he wrote Retreat from Truth in the 1950s he made a serious if not wholly successful attempt to grasp and grapple with certain theories of Russell, for whom he had always had an admiration. But though he pontificated a good deal on the subject of modern philosophy in that book and elsewhere, he never managed to study it very closely. Joachim had convinced him in advance that views of a certain sort could never be true, which meant of course that they could be dismissed without a hearing.