Alan Montefiore

Alan Claude Robin Goldsmid Montefiore (born 29 December 1926, London) Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford; President of the Forum for European Philosophy; Joint President of the Wiener Library; former Chair of Council of the Froebel Educational Institute. Son of Leonard Montefiore (1889-1961) who had been the Wiener Library's second president and later its chairman. Grandson of Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore (1858-1938) a past president of the Anglo-Jewish Association.

He was educated at Clifton College – a boarding school which had a separate house for Jewish boys. He then did national service as a soldier in Singapore.

A recurring theme of Montefiore's philosophical enquiries is the notion of identity. His philosophical arguments can be characterized as addressing four related concerns which, inevitably given his own Jewish origins, revolve around notions of Jewish identity. His book A Philosophical Retrospective summarizes his thinking so that the four themes become evident: 1. concerns the issue of how far it may be in anyone’s meaningful power to determine the nature and implications of their own identity—not only but especially in the case of those who may be considered by themselves or by others to be Jews; 2. concerns questions of how far the possession of a Jewish identity is to be seen as bound up with a relationship to Judaism as a system of religious belief and/or practice and of what might be the longer-term prospects for a purely secular Jewish identity, whether in Israel or in the Diaspora; 3. concerns an apparent tension between Judaism’s claim to being both a religion of universal import and yet that of a historically very particular people; 4. Montefiore’s personal perspective as being identified as a Jew and whether or not the possession of a Jewish identity is to be understood as carrying with it the acceptance of any particular obligations as to how to order one’s life.

Known for 30 works reproduced in 127 publications.

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