Biographical details

Dr Edmond Wright

Edmond Wright was a philosopher and a poet. This was unusual in the 20^th century, when a philosopher then was encouraged to combine being a logician with his study, and logic is still de rigueur in the syllabus.

He was born in Horwich, Lancashire, on August 6, 1927, into a family background which included grandparents, numerous aunts, uncles and cousins, a virtual communal family. His father's side was Roman Catholic, in which religion he was brought up; his parent's was Methodist, although she, as a convert on marriage, cleaved more rigidly to the Roman faith than his father. It is this background, set in a liminal landscape, half urban and half rural, that has provided the source of his poems. Horwich is a product of Victorian railway development, a town that burgeoned in 1867 around a single workshop of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, at the edge of the Manchester industrial region. The town is immediately next to Lever Park, the extensive park open to the public created by the philanthropist Lord Leverhulme along the reservoirs of Liverpool Corporation; it can be fairly described as a miniature Lake District, lying below the high moors of Rivington Pike and Winter Hill.

Two influences brought about this preference for poetry and philosophy. His father was a cinema projectionist and this meant that the young Edmond was constantly in the cinema in the thirties and forties, seeing the classical Hollywood canon and the early British films as they appeared (from Hitchcock and Ealing comedy to Carol Reed and David Lean). The medium came to fascinate him, both the creation of visual narrative and the actual process of the projecting of vision. A whole series of his poems, entitled 'The Picture House', derive from his experiences of being on both sides of screen and projector. One of the essays, a choice of his own, that he wrote in the sixth form of his grammar school (Rivington and Blackrod) was on the subject of colour experience.

The other influence was his love of literature, arising from his mother's and other family member's enthusiasm for it. He thus came to his studies of literature at Oxford with a special interest in the place of imagery and irony in the workings of words. His first degree was in English Language and Literature and he went on to teach the subject in the grammar school and the comprehensive school, becoming the head of an English department. In his thirties, however, he began to feel that his interest in imagery and narrative had not been well served by the teaching he had received at the university and, encouraged by his wife Elizabeth, who also was dissatisfied with her own early education, he, as she did, set about taking another first degree while still a teacher. He had first fixed upon psychology, thinking that his interest in perception would be best advanced by such study, but it proved impossible because the study of psychology involved much experimental work as a student and one's presence in the laboratory was a daily necessity. This being impossible for a serving teacher, he turned to philosophy, and, while his studies were for an external London degree, he was extremely fortunate, living near Oxford, through the intervention of friends to obtain as tutors there the young Gareth Evans and Brian Loar. He was also offered through the kindness of Father F. C. Coplestone, then at Heythrop College in Oxfordshire, the free use of the excellent philosophical library at the college. With this welcome help he obtained this second degree in 1969 and was accepted at his old Oxford college, Pembroke, for a doctoral degree in philosophy. He chose metaphor and metonymy as his topic, studying with J. O. Urmson as his graduate supervisor, who had a special interest in tropes from the point of view of the philosophy of aesthetics.

Another strong influence arose from his activity as a producer of plays while he was a teacher. He produced over twenty plays, varying from Shakespeare to Brecht; he wrote two himself, as well as being responsible for the first stage performance of William Golding's Lord of the Flies in 1957 (in his own version, one approved by the author). Narrative in the form of drama has thus been a fertile element in he development of his thought.

He obtained his doctorate in 1975, and, since that time has been an active philosopher, publishing regularly in the academic journals, initially on the subjects of language and perception, but later moving into narrative theory, epistemology and nationalism. In 1983 he edited The Ironic Discourse, a volume of the periodical Poetics Today (Vol. 4:3); in 1993 he edited a volume of essays on the philosophy of perception (New Representationalisms, Avebury, Aldershot), in which philosophers who do not subscribe to the fashionable denigration of qualia presented cogent objections to the current view.

He has been especially helped by his wife, who became a distinguished literary theorist, winning a British Academy prize for her work Psychoanalytic Criticism (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998). Her explorations into the functioning of the unconscious in language have healthily counteracted the influence of the overly rationalistic approach of much contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. He co-edited with her a reader on the Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Zizek (Blackwell, 1999) and a volume of the periodical Paragraph (24:2, July, 2001) devoted to reflections on his work.

Having over twenty-five years refined a philosophy of perception which, espousing qualia, relies on the correction of one social partner by another in an common act of faith, he is now engaged on pursuing the wider consequences of the epistemology it implies, in fields such as social theory, narrative theory, humour, literature, patriotism and religion. The trajectory of his work is reflected in the title of his book Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith (Palgrave Macmillan 2005), in which an examination of the Joke, the Story and the Game forms the basis of an account of how persons co-operate in language, the perceiving of the world that language facilitates, and in the societies within which they are created and live. In literary criticism has turned his attention upon Chaucer and Borges. Of late he has edited another collection of pro-qualia articles, The Case for Qualia (MIT Press, 2008), in which recent anti-qualia arguments are subjected to thorough objections from a variety of positions. His further analysis of the place of faith in language led to a book on the nature of religion, Avatar-Philosophy (and -Religion) or FAITHEISM (Plymouth: Imprint Academic, 2011).

Most of his poems are in the form of the 'hennet', a verse-form based on the hendecasyllabic line. In one series, The Wave Hennets, he uses the notion of the Wave to reflect on a wide variety of topics related to his philosophical theory. In another, The Hardy Hennets, he takes poems by Thomas Hardy and presents his own readings of them.

For some time before he passed away aged 89 on November 17, 2016, Dr. Wright was writing a book which brings his narrative philosophy to bear upon the teaching of English language and literature (unpublished). For any questions concerning Dr. Wright, please contact his son Oliver at olly@eng.hokudai.ac.jp