Thomas Dewar "Harry" Weldon (5 December 1896 – 13 May 1958) was a British philosopher.
Life
Thomas Weldon was born at 3 Bryanston Mansions, York Street, Marylebone, London, in 1896. After an education at
Tonbridge School
(God Giveth the Increase)
, established =
, closed =
, type = Public schoolIndependent day and boarding
, religion =
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, head_label ...
, he won a scholarship to read ''
Literae humaniores'' at
Magdalen College, Oxford, which he postponed to become an officer in the
Royal Field Artillery in 1915. He spent
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
in France and Belgium, rising to acting captain, being wounded and winning the
Military Cross
The Military Cross (MC) is the third-level (second-level pre-1993) military decoration awarded to officers and (since 1993) other ranks of the British Armed Forces, and formerly awarded to officers of other Commonwealth countries.
The MC ...
and bar. He finally went up to Oxford in 1919, graduating with a first class degree in 1921. Weldon was elected a fellow and philosophy tutor at his college two years later, getting to know
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British writer and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University (Magdalen College, 1925–1954) and Cambridge Univers ...
. He then served as Rhodes travelling fellow in 1930.
During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, he was a temporary civil servant in London from 1939 to 1942, then Personal Staff Officer to
"Bomber Harris" in
RAF Bomber Command at
High Wycombe
High Wycombe, often referred to as Wycombe ( ), is a market town in Buckinghamshire, England. Lying in the valley of the River Wye, Buckinghamshire, River Wye surrounded by the Chiltern Hills, it is west-northwest of Charing Cross in London, ...
from 1942 to 1945. His final duties there involved justifying Harris's controversial bombing strategy to politicians and the public.
His death in 1958 was attributed by college rumour to suicide but was in fact due to a cerebral haemorrhage.
[Additional biographical information found in T.D. Weldon, ''The Vocabulary of Politics'' (Penguin, 1960)]
Characterization of teaching style
In a review in the ''
London Review of Books'' of a newly published work by
,
R. W. Johnson said that it amounted to a tutorial: "The idea is to teach the young to think and argue, and the real past masters at it (Harry Weldon was always held up as an example to me) were those who first argued undergraduates out of their received opinions, then turned around after a time and argued them out of their new-found radicalism, leaving them mystified as to what they believed and suspended in a free-floating state of cleverness."
Works
*''Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason'' (1945; 2nd ed., 1958)
*''States and Morals'' (1946)
*''The Vocabulary of Politics'' (1953)
References
*
*R.W. Johnson, ''Look Back in Laughter: Oxford's Postwar Golden Age'' (2015) has extensive biographical material on Harry Weldon.
External links
Times Higher Education
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weldon
1896 births
1958 deaths
People educated at Tonbridge School
Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford
Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford
Royal Air Force personnel of World War II
Royal Artillery officers
British Army personnel of World War I
People from Marylebone
Recipients of the Military Cross
20th-century English philosophers
Royal Air Force officers