Abstract

In a sense every practising philosopher is a revolutionary—the pressing problems and personal insights of his human condition urge him to correct traditional thought, while he feels both retrospectively wiser than his predecessors and naively exposed to the criticism of his successors. Thus some members of the dominant current of British philosophy present their interpretation of its antecedents, methods and achievements during the past, sharply formative forty years. Somnolent for a century under the biting scepticism of Hume and the disinterest of clerical dons, university philosophy serenely developed after 1850 a psychological form of empiricism and a local form of German idealism. With the first World War came a sudden change. Philosophy became a lay subject for lay dons after 1920, with its faculty separated from psychology and classics, and with professional journals concentrating on the sheer technique of philosophy. It developed into a philosopher’s philosophy with occasional forays into admiring journalism, where smart criticism was valued more than sober prudence. In the giddy years before and after World War II the brash iconoclasm of an adolescent Logical Positivism won it un succés de scandale, which eventually drew upon British philosophy generally the charge of irresponsibility or futility as a way of life, since this in the last, serious analysis is the traditional role of a philosophy.