The historian of philosophy Anthony Kenny, who has died aged 95, was active as a lecturer and administrator at Oxford University for more than 50 years.

In A New History of Western Philosophy (four volumes, 2004-07), he aimed to emulate the “wit and readability” – while avoiding the inaccuracy – of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which had held sway since 1945. Arguably, he succeeded.

When, in 1957, Kenny entered the university, it was in its heyday as the centre of analytic philosophy, which seeks conceptual clarity through examining ordinary language. He had been ordained a priest, was still doing a doctorate for the Gregorian University in Rome, and joined St Benet’s Hall, then a Catholic establishment.

Taught and befriended by Elizabeth Anscombe, a professor and fellow Catholic, he became enthralled with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which formed the basis of his own – and accelerated his increasing religious scepticism. His dissertation, written at the start of a four-year curacy from 1959 in Liverpool, was published as Action, Emotion and Will in 1963, the year that he left the priesthood.

The critical acclaim it received enabled him immediately to join the Oxford faculty, for which he taught at Exeter and Trinity Colleges. In 1964 he was elected tutorial fellow at Balliol.

Although having set out to do original work in philosophy of mind and action, Kenny early on saw his distinctive contribution as lying in accessibly expounding philosophers of the past. He wrote and lectured on Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Frege and Wittgenstein with compelling verve, depth and lucidity.

The poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Arthur Hugh Clough, each a struggler with religious faith, were among the subjects of the 50 books he wrote, as were Thomas More (one of Kenny’s heroes), nuclear armament and mountain-climbing. He translated Aristotle’s underestimated Eudemian Ethics; and used stylometric techniques in support of the argument that it was Aristotle’s ultimate, therefore most mature and considered, ethical work.

In Will, Freedom and Power (1975), the sequel to his first book, Kenny tried to reconcile “liberty of spontaneity” – being able to do what I want because I want to, which potentially involves being unable to want anything else – with “liberty of indifference” – being able, whatever I want, to do other than what I do. His attempted compatibilism was regarded as ingenious but unsuccessful.

Writing Freewill and Responsibility (1978) led Kenny to study, and pass, exams for the bar in 1981-82 so as properly to tackle the legal issue of mens rea (mental intent).

After secretly teaching in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 80s, he was expelled “under an article of the criminal code forbidding hooliganism, which I had not realised included lecturing on Aristotle”.

From 1978 to 1989 Kenny was master of Balliol College, and skilfully tackled tumultuous shifts in Oxford academia, harmonising students’ radicalism with entrenched traditionalism, and fending off bureaucratic intrusions and financial cuts by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Under his watch, women were admitted to the college.

He was pro-vice-chancellor of the university from 1984 to 2001, at which point he also retired from teaching. He became a fellow of the British Academy in 1974, and was knighted in 1992.

As warden from 1989 to 1999 of Rhodes House, home of the trust administering scholarships in the mining magnate’s name, Kenny brought in reforms that included funding educational projects in South Africa after apartheid. “Cecil Rhodes must be turning in his grave,” it was often said. “Oh for a Rhodocycle to chart his spins!” riposted Kenny.

Born in Liverpool, Anthony was the son of Margaret (nee Jones) and John Kenny. His father, an Irish steamship engineer, left home when Anthony was two, and died in the early years of the second world war. Anthony was educated by nuns until the age of 12, when, inspired by his uncle, Alex Jones (a priest), he entered the city’s Upholland Junior Seminary.

From 1949 he studied at the Gregorian University, which taught turgid neo-scholasticism (in Latin) and secondhand Aristotle and Aquinas, but at least had some erudite teachers, including the Jesuit Frederick Copleston, a scrupulous if rather dull historian of philosophy.

Kenny became afflicted with doubt, realising that Aquinas’s celebrated five proofs of God’s existence were dependent on quaint medieval science; and (a more standard objection) they failed to reconcile God’s acclaimed/supposed omnipotence and omniscience with His goodness.

And surely the doctrine of transubstantiation (a “test case” for Catholic dogma”) relied on distorting Aristotle’s useful distinction between an object’s “substance” (underlying, continuous essence) and its variable, surface “accidents” (such as smoothness, whiteness, sweetness).

If a communion host could remain perceptibly unchanged while having “really” turned into Christ’s body, then “for all I could tell my typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli,” was Kenny’s final verdict.

In 1963, an article he wrote for a Catholic magazine had the headline “Pope John Says Ban the Bomb”. The pope, it said, advised that Catholics could not in good conscience work at manufacturing nuclear submarines. A rebuke from the future Cardinal (John) Heenan (they remained friends) precipitated Kenny into seeking laicisation.

Describing himself as a “devout agnostic”, rather than an atheist, he continued, in line with his views on nuclear warfare and killing civilians, to oppose abortion.

In 1966 he married the American singer and music teacher Nancy Gayley without seeking dispensation from the Church that he no longer believed in. The doctrinaire Anscombe told him she hoped they would be very unhappy, but seems to have been disappointed.

Late in life Kenny said that, after a miserable childhood and youth, he had found happiness. He and Nancy ran summer reading parties in a chalet on the slopes of Mont Blanc and would go hiking and mountain-climbing with their sons. She would read his various philosophies of history meticulously in order to cut out anything that would be “unintelligible to the non-philosopher”.

He is survived by Nancy and their two sons, Robert and Charles.

• Anthony John Patrick Kenny, philosopher and administrator, born 16 March 1931; died 3 August 2026