He was a considerable poker player; later in life he took up golf; he was widely read in all areas of literature. His quiet and thoughtful advice helped many people in their lives, including myself. He also contributed generously to the administration both of his college, serving as Dean from 1964 to 1979 and President, 1979-83, and of the Cambridge University departments in which he taught, and in the wider world.He had a wide and deep influence through his writing, teaching, public and radio talks, as well as in his ordinary human contacts. He could also be unconventional, as with one student, who later became a professional philosopher, whom he encouraged, during a prolonged crisis, to leave aside academic philosophy and read the great Russian novelists.

Hence Bambrough’s influential and controversial paper “Universals and Family Resemblances” (1961).He also wrote extensively on moral philosophy, on the meaning and logic of religious beliefs, and on the nature of philosophy and of philosophical problems. He maintained the classical position of the English-speaking world of philosophy, that there is a logical difference between first- order statements of different categories (matter, mind, ethics, time etc) and the meta- questions about the meaning and status of propositions from these first- order categories that constitute philosophy proper.But he also argued for a closer connection between some types of first- order questions, such as ethical, political and aesthetic questions, with philosophy itself than was usual in the Sixties and Seventies, a connection based, in his view, on the fact that in both areas reason proceeds in a case-by-case, informal manner, using the language of ordinary speech.Bambrough was a wonderful teacher, rigorous, fair and committed to a dialogic style. His earlier grounding, apart from lively debates with his future wife, Moira, and others at a sixth-form Sunday debating group in Sunderland, and with fellow miners during his conscription as a Bevin Boy at Wearmouth Colliery in 1944, was in Plato and Aristotle.He came to believe that Wittgenstein’s work disproved his (Wittgenstein’s) dismissal of theories in philosophy; he felt that after Wittgenstein it was possible to answer certain fundamental philosophical questions. He argued passionately for the scope for reason in all areas of thought.

He had no truck with fashionable positions such as reductionism, emotivism, relativism or subjectivism. He argued, conclusively in my view, for the objectivity of moral judgements as of philosophy itself. For him truth was not, as it was for David Hume, the equivalent of the fox for a fox- hunt (something that gives an extra spice to the ride) but the in-principle attainable end and justification of the activity of philosophy.
Bambrough was strongly influenced by the work of Moore, Wittgenstein and Wisdom in Cambridge, where he had won scholarships and prizes at St John’s College. RENFORD BAMBROUGH was a philosopher through and through, a philosopher by vocation. It can be heard on the dozens of recordings he made, from the 1940s onwards, winning no fewer than 14 Grammy awards – and it will influence the sound of choral singing in North America and much further afield for many years to come.Martin AndersonRobert Lawson Shaw, conductor: born Red Bluff, California 30 April 1916; married first Maxine Farley (marriage dissolved), second 1974 Caroline Saulas (died 1995; three sons, one daughter); died New Haven, Connecticut 25 January 1999.. Standing in corners, hiding under rugs, ducking into subway stations, peering out from under rugs Refugees.

Dammit, you’re all a bunch of Whole- Note Nazis!The Shaw choral sound was beautifully blended and refined, but also rich and full-bodied. He couldn’t have known that it would have been his last: he suffered a massive stroke on Sunday evening, and died in the early hours of Monday.Shaw’s technique for rehearsing choruses involved isolating elements in the music – rhythm, pitch or enunciation – to focus attention on them, often with some humour. He would write letters to his singers (beginning “Dear People”, a greeting Joseph Mussulman borrowed for a biography of Shaw in 1979) to put his points across, enjoining them (for example) to respect lesser note-values in a manner which suggested the preacher was still alive in him:I get a horrible picture, from the way you sing, of little bitty eighth notes [quavers] running like hell all over the place to keep from being stepped on Millions of ‘em! Meek, squeaky little things No self-respect. Earlier this month he had to withdraw from this year’s workshop because of back problems.