Obituary: Mary Warnock died on March 20th

A QUESTION Mary Warnock often asked herself was why she had become a philosopher at all. She was not much good at it. Her many books, written mostly for money, contained no original thinking. For a while, when she was first up at Oxford reading Mods and Greats, she thought she would be a historian of ancient Greece. But she was not scholarly in that way. In the end she embraced philosophy because she fell in love with a philosopher, Geoffrey Warnock, and it seemed a practical arrangement. They could share books, and swap learned aphorisms as they washed the dishes. And so they did. A drunken young man who climbed into their lodgings once, when Geoffrey was principal of Hertford, reported that he had found them in bed discussing Kant. That was fantasy, but whenever she took on yet another project Geoffrey would quote Hobbes at her, about the reckless pursuit of power.