Alan Claude Robin Goldsmid Montefiore was born in London in 1926, the son of Leonard Montefiore, the Wiener Library’s second president and later its chairman, and grandson of Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore, a past president of the Anglo-Jewish Association. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, attending where he attended in its separate house for Jewish boys. Here, he excelled in every sport, and this would continue throughout his life, notably in tennis and squash.

Because his beloved international cricket fixtures were put on hold during the war, he sated his love of statistics by keeping a running score of Luftwaffe aircraft shot down versus RAF ones, as reported on the radio. Montefiore did three years of National Service, principally as a soldier in Singapore, where he helped to repatriate Japanese prisoners of war. He had learned Hokkien at the London university Soas, and visiting Singapore 50 years later he astonished locals by directing them to their destination. On his return, he read PPE at Balliol College, alongside Bernard Williams and JR (John) Lucas.

Unsure what to do next, a chance offer led to a teaching post at the new Keele University in 1952, and having eased his way into teaching, he returned to Balliol in 1961 as a fellow. He was one of the early Anglophone analytic philosophers to take a serious interest in post-Kantian German and French philosophy. His Modern European Philosophy series and his Philosophy in France Today, where 11 leading contemporary French philosophers including Jacques Derrida, presented their work, stimulated the growing interest in French philosophy.

Montefiore was busy connecting “the heart of the Anglo-American philosophical empire to the barely-acknowledged and perpetually fog-bound territories of the Continent,” according to Professor Stephen Mulhall, another of his students.

In keeping with his “expansive approach”, as his Balliol colleague and former student Professor Steven Lukes termed it, he involved non-philosophers in his projects. Economists, journalists, scientists, doctors, and psychologists, all contributed to a stirring volume Integrity (1999), with a key chapter on Gert-Rudolf Flick’s donation to Oxford University, which provoked ethical questions on fundraising and the Holocaust legacy. This is also reflected in his output. He co-edited and contributed to The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (1990); Philosophy and the Human Paradox (2019), essays on reason, truth and identity of the self; Goals, No-Goals and Own Goals (1989), debates between scientists and philosophers on intentional behaviour; and Neutrality and Impartiality (1975) on universities and political commitment and free speech, a topic that is back in the spotlight today.

A recurring theme was the notion of identity. He was uncommitted to the Jewish faith, yet carried the weight of Jewish history and his forebears, along with their community leadership and philanthropy. His father had run the Lake District camp for rehabilitating child survivors from Auschwitz.

In A Philosophical Retrospective (2011), his penultimate work, he set out to capture how far one can meaningfully know one’s own identity and the extent to which a Jew is free to be secular. He valued his regular lunches with the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin. As he worked in his study he loved to polish stones. He also loved kite flying with his children. They remember his patient skill in unravelling strings so well that as the kite rose into the sky, all knots and tangles would invariably disappear. For Montefiore, however, philosophy could never be about simplifying or straightening out. He loved complexity in people as much as ideas, as Lukes put it, not to obscure but to reach further clarity. “One key lesson he taught me was the Socratic one that sometimes it is better for a dispute to continue than for either side to prevail, because of the sheer difficulty of reaching a convincing conclusion.”

At his London funeral mourners were invited to take home one of his beloved polished stones and offered Newcastle Brown Ale, his favourite tipple. This he would buy by the crate from the Balliol bar while his son would see off parking wardens at the college back gates during loading.

In his life beyond the academy he was a founding member of the Jan Hus Education Foundation, which sent philosophers to central Europe in the 1980s for underground lectures before the 1989 Velvet Revolution. In 2019, Montefiore was awarded the Czech Honorary Jan Masaryk Silver Medal.

He was founding president of the Forum for European Philosophy, housed for 25 years at the London School of Economics, making all schools of philosophy accessible to a wider public through free weekly discussions. He continued from his Singapore days working with Chinese scholars during Deng Xiaoping’s time and was an active chair of the Froebel Educational Institute council. As president of the Wiener Holocaust Library he secured its significant antisemitic document collection despite financial straits.

In 1952 he married Hélène (née Pivant), with whom he had three children: Anne, a counsellor, Claire, a psychotherapist, and Paul, a photographer and interior designer. All survive him. He loved digging holes on the beach and sledging on Boars Hill with his children. He and Hélène divorced in 1985 and he married the French political philosopher Catherine Audard, embracing her three children, Sylvain and Laure-Hélène, who both survive him, and Florence.

Montefiore had a lifelong commitment to philosophy, philanthropy, and social responsibility. On his 85th birthday, he was astounded to receive a surprise festschrift with 49 essays from former students and colleagues. He is remembered as ever curious and always calibrating the complex seams of identity — whether of a porter or professor, student or scout. He believed you could not be who you are without others. That dominated his interaction with other people because he saw everyone as essential in his, and each other’s, very identity.

He was once so caught up in a discussion while fielding on the boundary of a college cricket match, he stepped over the boundary, forgetting his duties. “I urged him back into play as he had missed a couple of balls,” recalled Paul Flather, another student. “But in reality Alan always knew his preferred and best field of play.”

Alan Montefiore, philosopher, was born on December 29, 1926. He died from a cardiac arrest on October 29, 2024, aged 97