The philosopher Stuart Hampshire did not generate a coherent doctrine so much as formulate disturbing questions and indicate the wide, sometimes unlimited, range of considerations that arose from them. He was not one of the dominant philosophers of his age, and was often found lacking in incisiveness, rigour and clarity, but he moved in a wider intellectual world and was aware of implications of systems of thought which more dogmatic thinkers of greater power tended to ignore.

He was fascinated by metaphysical questions but rejected tidy answers such as utilitarianism or positivism. Instead, his thinking was tentative, literary. He valued “a certain kind of confusion”, taking into account the tragedy, individualism and responsibilities of life. For much of his career he put great faith in socialism, as did most of the elite coterie in which he spun, yet he was never a doctrinaire Marxist. In essence he was a late-Enlightenment humanist, whose belief in the importance of a way of life established over generations could have come directly from Edmund Burke.

Perhaps he understood too much to have the ruthlessness required for parricide that marks great pioneers in thought. Yet he was one of the most charming, gifted and civilised Englishmen of his time, a natural member of the intelligentsia, and a central figure in the humanisation of empiricism which gave “Oxford philosophy” its special quality.

He was a fresh, subtle, imaginative and psychologically sensitive thinker, and his best work ranged from ethics and aesthetics to psychology and the philosophy of mind. His articles on philosophical topics in professional journals were notable for a rich suggestiveness which at times stimulated readers more than better formulated arguments by others. And Hampshire, with his many literary and artistic friends — from W. H. Auden to Anthony Blunt — had much the wider influence.

The least parochial and insular of essayists, he also wrote a good deal on literature and other topics for The Times Literary Supplement (anonymously at first) and elsewhere. He was an excellent critic — his review of Dr Zhivago, for instance, was praised by Pasternak as the best account of his book in English — and his literary articles in The Listener, The Observer , the New Statesman and The New York Review of Books were much admired, most notably those on Henry James, Joyce, Wittgenstein, Forster and Virginia Woolf.

He was also a contributor to Encounter, and after the disclosure in 1967 that it had received funds indirectly from the CIA, he was one of a group of friends, including Isaiah Berlin and Richard Wollheim, who discussed establishing a similar monthly magazine. Although nothing came of those plans, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hampshire joined another group — including Stephen Spender, David Astor and Lord Gardiner — to form the trust which published Index on Censorship.

Stuart Newton Hampshire was born in 1914 and educated at Repton School, where Geoffrey Fisher, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was headmaster. Fisher began every morning, Hampshire recalled, not in prayer but studying his stocks and shares.

At school Hampshire was trained as a modern historian, and in particular the two books by Namier on 18th-century politics in England made a profound and lifelong impression on him. He won a history scholarship at Balliol in 1933, but there abandoned history for Greats, in which he obtained an outstandingly good first in 1936.

His mental gifts, personal distinction and striking good looks marked him out from the beginning; he was one of the most admired Oxford undergraduates of the day, at once a leading intellectual, and a man of exceptional charm, natural goodness, and a degree of moral integrity that gave him a good deal of natural authority among his contemporaries.

During his undergraduate years he displayed both originality and sensibility as a student of the arts, particularly painting and literature, which influenced his thought in later life. His intellectual development probably owed less to his tutors or to established academic figures than to highly gifted contemporaries, mainly at Balliol, and contact with two or three dons a few years older than himself, such as A. J. Ayer and J. L. Austin. Introduced to Isaiah Berlin in 1935 to talk about Kafka, he continued the conversation — as he recalled in his eulogy in 1998 — for 62 years.

In 1936 Hampshire won a scholarship at All Souls and decided on a career of teaching and research in philosophy. He began as a logical positivist and disciple of Ayer, but after a year or two he began to move in a different direction. While he remained a convinced naturalist, and was never touched by religious or transcendental thought, he became dissatisfied with what appeared to him to be the over-mechanical concepts and formulae of the British disciples of the then dominant Vienna school — in particular with the atomism of Russell and his followers, who appeared to him guilty of a radical misunderstanding of the function of philosophy. Part of the duty of moral philosophy, he came to believe, was to guide practice.

His first philosophical essay appeared in 1939, and gave evidence of unusual insight. His writing was not as precise or rigorous as that of his models, but at times it was a great deal more suggestive and responsive to a wide range of human activity, especially art, literature and psychology.

The outbreak of war found him at All Souls; he was a passionate socialist and a patriot, touched neither by pacifism nor by scepticism about the justice of his country’s cause. After training in England he was given a commission and sent to Sierra Leone; later he was seconded to one of the intelligence units near London, working with Oxford colleagues such as Gilbert Ryle, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Charles Stuart.