The elephant and the tortoise. (Philosophy & Ideas).(Michael Oakeshott)

THE CONSERVATIVE philosopher Michael Oakeshott liked to quote the poet Dunbar: "Man, please thy Maker, and be merry, And give not for this world a cherry." In one of his notebooks he wrote: "Please put this on my grave."

As it turned out, the lines were not put on his grave in rural Dorset when he died in December 1990. But their spirit continues to inform any gathering of "Oakeshottians", including those who met for three days last northern autumn at the London School of Economics to commemorate the centenary of Oakeshott's birth and to scrutinise his works.

It was perhaps not the sort of conference that Oakeshott himself would have attended. The idea may have been a little too grandiose for a man who, like his "contemporary" Pascal, believed that to be a true philosopher you must make light of philosophy. When a disciple once asked him, "What do you think of human beings?" Oakeshott replied: "They are like cats." When pressed to explain, he added: "They take themselves very seriously."

This sceptical mood may help explain why quite a few prominent English admirers of Oakeshott were notable for their absences. But Lord Quinton, Kenneth Minogue and Robert Grant gave papers, as did a large contingent of distinguished scholars from the United States (including Timothy Fuller, Josiah Lee Auspitz and Patrick Riley and new voices such as Steven Grosby). Antony Flew, Anthony O'Hear and Robert Orr chaired several of the sessions. Oakeshott's widow Cristel and his son Simon attended throughout.

The first day of the conference was memorable for the personal statements by friends of Oakeshott. Fuller, for example, told of Oakeshott's arrival in the American West in 1974 and how (like Oscar Wilde about a century earlier) he had electrified his audience with his graceful and powerful oration--his famous paper on the voice of the university in the conversation of mankind. ("I have crossed half the world," he told his Colorado listeners, "to find myself in familiar surroundings--a place of learning.")

Oakeshott's friend Noel O'Sullivan of Hull caught "Oakshottianism" brilliantly with his answer to the question: "Why read Oakeshott?" The answer was that in an age when leading intellectuals revelled in angst, despair, absurdity, nothingness and nihilism, Oakeshott was unique in achieving "a fundamentally affirmative outlook". Cheerfulness kept breaking in. O'Sullivan identified three components in this vision: Oakeshott's philosophy of modesty (rejecting absolutes), his pagan sense of piety (rejecting modernity), and his picaresque belief in laughter as a better prophylactic than philosophy against the corruption of egotism.

After that the conference settled down to exegesis. There were learned papers on Oakeshott's marginalia on Kant, his epistemological separatism, his temporal solipsism, and even his Confucianism. There were inevitably references to Wittgenstein: according to legend they met once, in a Lyons Corner House in Cambridge, but it is not known what if anything was said; probably each remained silent. There were also references to the lost book he wrote on St ...