David Pears was one of the first and most Oxonian of the immediately postwar “Oxford philosophers” and he remained dedicated to advancing and teaching the subject throughout a long life into a period when the centre of such philosophy had shifted to the US.

His chief gift was an ability to follow through a complicated and even quirky train of thought to arrive at an explanation, a “theory”, of some phenomenon, that somehow accommodated both common sense and science and the thoughts of previous philosophers.

He could also see how a pupil’s thinking could be steered in a like direction, and this made him much in demand as a supervisor and visiting professor.

Born into the family that brought the transparent soap to the world and then sold it for less than its true value, he was brought up on a Devon farm and was a fount of country and marine lore, studying everything for himself, with the particular help of Fabre’s Book of Insects.

At Westminster School he was one of a brilliant generation — including Hugh Lloyd Jones, Richard Wollheim, Patrick Gardiner and Julian Brown — who all went on to Oxford with him and continued to inspire each other. At Balliol, under tutors such as Russell Meiggs and Donald McKinnon, he learnt more than eccentricity, and Sandy Lindsay, the Master, would have sent him to Scotland to teach the Classics, but a fortunate period in hospital allowed him to reflect and see that philosophy was his real interest.

In those days the subject was developed by constant discussion on long walks in the meadows, with frequent meetings of small groups and some “must” lectures such as John Austin’s “Sense and Sensibilia”.

Pears was at the centre of all this and a robust disputant: “I wouldn’t stake my reputation on this,” said one prudent speaker. “Who cares about your reputation?” was Pears’s comment, always intent on the philosophic, not the personal, nub.

His first papers were on philosophic conundrums, such as the Incongruity of Counterparts (why exactly a left-hand glove will not fit a right hand; why are right and left but not top and bottom reversed in a mirror; and the like), Colour Incompatibility (what is the nature of the impossibility for a thing to be red and green all over) and the like.

It is relevant here that Pears was a remarkably visual person (he read many languages for example, but was reluctant to speak them). Readers of Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net will find whole passages of conversation taken from him. His pieces were not easy to understand, but you felt that if you could understand them you would have solved the problem.

Another “must” was Gilbert Ryle’s class on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which led to Pears being asked to retranslate that work (along with Brian McGuinness); their translation is perhaps now that chiefly used for teaching or study.

This opened up a key interest of Pears’s professional life, and he wrote several books on the early and the later Wittgenstein, notably the two volumes of The False Prison, suggesting that there is a whole set of illusions that we can escape from by resolutely thinking through our problems.

The middle Wittgenstein was seen to be doing exactly this. Pears was delighted to retrace his steps, half recognising that he was always pushing Wittgenstein towards a theory, though that is exactly what Wittgenstein (whose slogan was “Nothing is hidden”) was trying to avoid, relying on a right view of the practices concerned rather than any reasoning implicit in them. Still, Pears admired the depth of Wittgenstein’s thought, the sense of the profundity and complexity of the human world. He returned to him in his last book, Paradox and Platitude in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy (2006).