Patrick Lancaster Gardiner, FBA (17 March 1922 – 24 June 1997) was a British academic philosopher and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a specialist in the philosophy of history but wrote on a wider array of topics, publishing notable studies of Schopenhauer in 1963 and Kierkegaard in 1988.
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Life and work
Gardiner was born in Chelsea, London, on 17 March 1922. His father was Clive Gardiner, a landscape artist and principal of Goldsmiths College; his mother was Lilian Lancaster, an artist and a pupil of Walter Sickert. His paternal grandfather was Alfred George Gardiner, editor of The Daily News. His younger brother was the architect Stephen Gardiner.
Gardiner was educated at home until 1933 when he was enrolled at Westminster School. His contemporaries included Richard Wollheim and David Pears who became fellow philosophers and lifelong friends. As a pupil he displayed, and pursued, a passion for literature and history. He matriculated as Christ Church, Oxford in 1940 where he received a First in history in 1942.
Almost immediately after he completed his studies, he was called up into the Army and saw active service in North Africa and Italy. After being demobbed in 1945 he returned to Oxford and chose to pursue a second honours course in PPE and then further research which would become his B.Litt. thesis (1950) and his first book, The Nature of Historical Explanation in 1952. His Times obituarist writes that this work "established the concept of an analytic philosophy of history".