Geoffrey Warnock
Sir Geoffrey James Warnock was a philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Before his knighthood, he was commonly known as G. J. Warnock.Life
Warnock was born at Neville House, Chapel Allerton, Leeds, West Yorkshire, to James Warnock, OBE, a general practitioner from Northern Ireland who had been a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Kathleen. The Warnocks later lived at Grade II-listed Pull Croft, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.
Warnock was educated at Winchester College. He then served with the Irish Guards until 1945, before entering New College, Oxford, with a classics scholarship. He was elected to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1949. After spending three years at Brasenose College, he returned to Magdalen as a Fellow and tutor in philosophy. In 1970, he was elected to Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, where there is now a society and student house named after him. He was also the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1981 to 1985.
Warnock and his co-editor J. O. Urmson performed an invaluable service to the development of "analytic" or "linguistic" philosophy by preparing for publication the papers of their friend and fellow Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin.
Warnock married Mary Wilson, a fellow philosopher of St Hugh's College, Oxford, and later Baroness Warnock, in 1949. They had two sons and three daughters. He retired to live near Marlborough, Wiltshire, in 1988 and died of degenerative lung disease in 1995 at Axford in Wiltshire.Works
- Berkeley, Penguin Books, 1953.
- English Philosophy Since 1900, 1st edition, Oxford University Press, 1958; 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 1969.
- Contemporary Moral Philosophy , Palgrave Macmillan, 1967..
- The Object of Morality, Methuen, 1971..
- J. L. Austin , Routledge, 1989.
