Richard Wollheim had just become Professor, and he ran the department as an intellectual community without hierarchy, status-consciousness or adherence to any particular school of thought. The years at UCL were important for Cohen. When I joined the department as a graduate student the next year, Cohen had already become a full Lecturer, and was Reader from 1979-1984. was not required to hold a university post. His was the last generation of academics of whom a Ph.D. This was the golden age of philosophy at Oxford, and Cohen studied under Ryle and Berlin before taking up his first teaching post in 1963, as Assistant Lecturer in the philosophy department at University College, London. Quine attacks Gilbert Ryle with a left-hook existential quantifier, and Ryle responds with a swift right category error) to his 10-minute absurdist disquisition – delivered in the exact intonations of President Eisenhower – on 'the fin(n),' at the end of which the listener still does not know whether the subject is a fish, an aeroplane or a native of Helsinki. Some of his monologues have been recorded they ranged from his famous Philosophers' Boxing Match (in which, for example, W.V.O. in Philosophy, Cohen had perfected the role of stand-up comedian avant la lettre. (The explanation: though the Jewish population was only six per cent, until 1998 all Montreal Schools were run either by the Protestant or by the Catholic school boards, and hardly any Jewish pupils wished to be taught at the French language Catholic schools.) In 1961 he left McGill University with a first in Politics and Philosophy, a highly developed sense of irony, an ability to make himself the self-deprecating centre of attention (aged 12 he had made 'a speech before an audience of a couple of thousand at the Canadian Peace Congress in Toronto'), a wonderful gift for mimicry in at least three languages and a strong, gentle, never cruel sense of the funniness of it all.īy the time he reached New College, Oxford that autumn to do a B.Phil.

In 1953 Cohen entered Strathcona Academy in Montreal, a school run by the Protestant school board, where 90 per cent of his classmates were Jewish, though all the teachers were non-Jews.

Jerry cohen ufw