Martin Hollis had a famously sharp tongue. Very Oxonian. When he turned up at the Philosophy department at UEA in my third year as a student there he was the first person to be appointed who wasn't Cambridge. He upset quite a lot of people, but he was very talented, very professional and very amusing. He was also very hard on me. I was a talented but self-indulgent and undisciplined student who had been allowed to get away with murder in my first two years. I wrote essays that were structureless streams of consciousness. They were appalling, actually. Martin roasted me alive, and quite right too. I still have my essays for him with his comments on them. Every now and then i get them out and look at them—and Martin's comments—to remind myself that i wasn't always the pillar of wisdom that I am—of course—now. I miss him, and i wish he were still around so i could thank him

There is an interesting question in philosophy of mind. I can feel pain in parts of my body that do not have nerve endings. Are these real pains, or merely referred pains (where 'referred' is an alienating adjective.) In Martin's philosophy of mind class at UEA, someone was saying that these pains are genuine pains, and are not to be defaced by having any alienating adjective slapped on them. As my flatmate Ivor reports it, Martin Hollis said

``Does that mean that Professor Grice can feel a pain in his bicycle?''

(Russell Grice—author of The Grounds of Moral Judgement—was the head of department, and would commute by bike to and from his house in College road just up the hill from Ivor and me).

I think the answer is probably `yes'. There is a literature on how people come to `own' prosthetic limbs... i'm not sure that they describe themselves as feeling pains in those limbs, but they can come to feel that they are part of their bodies... There are parallel questions about proprioception rather than pain and then there is an obvious parallel with Dawkins' idea of the Extended Phenotype.

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