We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not
content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free … from
the prison we have made for ourselves, by our ways of knowing, our limited
and false habits of thought, our ‘common sense'.
Saul Bellow,
Nobel Laureate
Owen Barfield died in 1997, in his 100th year. His was one of the most original minds of the 20th century.
A member of the Inklings, an Oxford group of scholars, Barfield’s thinking informed the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, among others.
A Christian philosopher, he drew much inspiration from Rudolf Steiner and also from the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
His abiding interest was the history of language, through which he investigated the evolution of consciousness.