A DISTINGUISHED philosopher and one of the founding members of the Open University’s philosophy department, Oswald Hanfling wrote with unwavering lucidity on an extraordinarily wide range of topics, and was regarded with enormous affection in the profession.

The younger son of Jewish parents, Hanfling was born in Berlin in 1927. The family business, a gentlemen’s outfitters, was vandalised on Kristallnacht, and in the spring of 1939 he was sent to England by Kindertransport, the rescue effort that brought thousands of Jewish children to the UK from Nazi Germany. Separated from his family, which he traced to Israel with the help of the Red Cross after the war, he lived with foster families in Bedford, and left school in 1941 at the age of 14.

During the next 25 years Hanfling worked in various businesses, first as an office boy, then in accountancy and auditing departments, eventually running his own business, an employment agency for au pairs. Bored by business, he put himself through A levels and enrolled on a BA correspondence course in philosophy at Birkbeck College. A first in his BA encouraged him to embark on a PhD. He completed his thesis, Pleasure, Pain and Emotion, in 1971, by which time he had closed down his business and been appointed to a lecturership in philosophy at the Open University.

The OU had come into existence while Hanfling was writing his thesis. Labour’s manifesto for the 1966 general election included a commitment to create a “University of the Air”, a planning committee was set up in the following year, and the first students began work on their foundation courses in January 1971. Hanfling was hired in 1970, when the first course materials were being prepared, and over the next two decades he wrote admirably clear and undumbed-down OU course booklets on Body and Mind, Philosophy of Language, Cause and Effect, Solipsism and the Self, Uses and Abuses of Argument, John Locke, and more. By common consent, he was the best writer of philosophy for distance learning the OU has had.

Hanfling was ideally suited to the OU. He knew what it was like to put oneself through university as an adult with a demanding job and a young family. He could write consistently intelligent philosophy that remained balanced and straightforward without ever flagging or becoming banal. And he could write at the demanding pace the OU expected from the authors of its course materials. He progressed from lecturer to senior lecturer to Reader, and was finally promoted to a professorial chair in 1993, the year in which he retired.

Wittgenstein’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s were the single most important influence on Hanfling’s thought. But there are several interpretations of these writings. Hanfling’s Wittgenstein cannot be assimilated to any of the traditional schools or -isms. He is the Wittgenstein who regarded philosophical theories about mind and body, about reality and illusion, and about thought and language as symptoms of an intellectual disease.

Hanfling’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is set out explicitly in his book Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy (1989), and in a collection of articles, Wittgenstein and the Human Form of Life (2002). But his study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy informed all of his work.

His first book, Logical Positivism (1981), remains the best non-partisan introduction to the 20th century’s most important philosophical school, in some respects the equivalent in philosophy of high modernism in architecture and design. The book was written a decade or so after logical positivism had been authoritatively declared “as dead as any philosophical movement ever becomes”, and Hanfling did not try to revive it. But he did justice to the freshness and intellectual courage of the movement, as well as exploring the weaknesses and inconsistencies in its main ideas. The book concludes with a discussion of the logical positivists’ views about moral thinking, which were shallow and unconvincing. Hanfling’s own contribution to moral philosophy came later, in the book he was working on when he died.

The Search for Meaning (1987), ie, the meaning of life, was on a topic Wittgenstein had given short shrift. “The solution of the problem of life,” he wrote in the Tractatus, “is seen in the vanishing of this problem.”

By contrast, Hanfling’s discussion, which includes death and suffering, the idea that life has a purpose, and the foundations of human values in human nature, is balanced, humane and entirely undogmatic. Perhaps the only intensely personal thought expressed in the book is his defence of Aristotle’s view that the urge to know is a fundamental part of human nature; and his conviction that “the pursuit of knowledge gives meaning to human life as a whole”.

The 1980s was Hanfling’s most productive decade. As well as the three books already mentioned, he wrote a series of articles about knowledge, certainty and doubt, stimulated by Wittgenstein’s work on these concepts; and he also began to work in philosophical aesthetics, initially for a new course at the OU.

In the articles about knowledge, he argued that the attempt to define knowledge in terms of more basic concepts, such as truth and belief — an enterprise to which epistemology had been slavishly committed for two decades — was bound to be fruitless, because whether someone can be said to know something depends on the kind of situation, so that what counts as knowledge in a court of law, for example, may differ from what counts as knowledge in a pub.

Hanfling’s last completed book contains the fullest exposition of his philosophical ideas, both about philosophical method, and about some of the main topics philosophy has been concerned with during the past 100 years — the definition of knowledge, the relationship between language and the world, the possibility of metaphysics, and the nature of the human mind. Philosophy and Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of Our Tongue (2000) is a lucid and painstaking defence of another philosophical movement, or way of doing philosophy, that has been authoritatively declared dead.

Ordinary language philosophy was partly inspired by Wittgenstein, in particular by his struggle, as he put it, “against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language”, and his desire to bring words back “from their metaphysical to their everyday use”. But by the 1980s most philosophers felt that philosophy should have grander aspirations, and many accepted Bertrand Russell’s view that, if this was philosophy, it was “at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement”. Hanfling’s book was therefore deeply unfashionable, and it was hard to be sure whether this was something he regarded with complete indifference or something he quietly enjoyed.

In some ways, Hanfling seemed very English. His extraordinary mildness of character and his mistrust of grandiose ideas seemed English somehow. It was impossible to tell, either from his conversation or from his writings, that he was not a native English speaker. (He once commented to Elizabeth Anscombe that he found it strange that Wittgenstein had continued to write in German throughout his life. Anscombe; who must have assumed that Hanfling was English, replied tartly that only someone who wasn’t able to read Wittgenstein in German could have made that remark.) He loved cycling and walking in the English countryside, and invented Heath-Robinsonian contraptions to keep his feet warm or to store his books.

Iris Murdoch once pointed out that philosophy tends to swing back and forth between metaphysical speculation and common sense: one philosopher declares that time is unreal, another replies that he has just had breakfast. Hanfling was unequivocally of the latter kind. He combined an obstinate commitment to simplicity in thought and the plain expression of ideas, a complete lack of self-importance or vanity, and a disarming innocence and charm.

In 1954 he married Helga Weissrock, an art teacher, who was also a refugee from Berlin. He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.

Oswald Hanfling, philosopher, was born on December 21, 1927. He died on October 25, 2005, aged 77.