Abstract

Professor Campbell Garnett has here presented a history, critique and synthesis of several widely diverse philosophical methods and conclusions. With great simplicity he gives an account of the genesis of idealism and the early twentieth century reaction towards realism, highlighting William James’ ‘Does Consciousness Exist’ and G E Moore’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’. Two methods involved are singled out: introspection, emphasised by the ‘acknowledged master of this art’, James and Moore’s linguistic analysis, leading to the analysis of ordinary language and the attempt to develop an ideal language. The author then proposes the analysis of mental life as the most important and central task of the philosopher.. In proof of the validity of this method, it is said that ‘All the various departments of philosophy are analyses of different parts or phases of mental life. Logic is an analysis of the processes of statements and inference; ethics is an analysis of the moral consciousness, and aesthetics of the aesthetic consciousness; epistemology is an analysis of the processes of perception and conception’. This seems to me misleading; the author has already associated analysis of mental life with armchair psychology; and can ‘analysis’ be used to cover critical evaluation? This characterisation of the task of philosophy leads to seeing phenomenology, as ‘a technique in which reflective analysis of the categories is sharpened by the setting aside of other questions’ which is very vague; ‘analysis of ordinary language’ is said to be ‘an analysis of meaning, not in the objective sense of the usage of words as described in the dictionary, but in the subjective sense of their use, of what the use means or intends to do by framing and uttering his sentences’. It also leads to that conflation of philosophy of mind and epistemology/ontology which leads to much confusion, and which it has been the achievement of contemporary philosophy on both sides of the linguistic divide to disentangle.