  After the war, Hare returned to Balliol to complete the four years of Greats. Even before he sat Finals, he was offered a lectureship at Balliol, which almost immediately became a fellowship. Hare always claimed to have learnt a lot from his pupils, and his early years at Balliol granted him outstanding ones—four of whom, Bernard Williams, David Pears, Richard Wollheim, and John Lucas, were to join him both as professional philosophers, and as Fellows of the British Academy. Lucas narrates how he and his contemporaries would plan a day’s campaigning, with a succession of tutees concerting, through the day, objections to some settled opinion of Hare’s, and replies to his replies—with Williams sent in last to deliver the coup de grâce that was never, in the event, fatal. No one who never experienced Hare’s impromptu fielding of objections can really understand the resilience of even his less plausible convictions. And yet, despite some impressions, he was quite capable of admitting the force of fair counter-arguments. He had a faith that apparent disagreements can usually be resolved once confusions are removed (whence the over-sanguine title of his last book, Sorting Out Ethics, 1997a). This went with a presumption that objections to his views rested on confusion, one that could lead to a degree of asperity. He recognized that the brusquely economical format of his “Comments” within Hare and Critics (which he seriously wanted to be titled, after a pub-name familiar in England, “Hare and Hounds”) might be taken amiss (1988a: 201):