Abstract

It is a tacit assumption among most contemporary American and British philosophers that the question of style in philosophy is, at most, an issue of peripheral importance. Although it is generally agreed that a well developed sense of style may make a philosopher’s work more accessible and thus be a factor in its acceptance by a wider audience, and although it seems self-evident to many that the apparent inaccessibility of much of continental philosophy is due in part to stylistic vagaries to which it is particularly prone, few would accord to style an importance beyond this. Certainly style is not an integral part of a philosophical position. It is always possible in principle, so the dominant view today suggests, to separate the position being expressed from the style the author employs in expressing it. The position itself is equated with the body of propositions that the philosopher is asserting; the style in which these are expressed either has no bearing on the truth value of the propositions and is consequently irrelevant or else it can be incorporated into either the propositions themselves or the structure of the argument, in which case it is no longer primarily a stylistic consideration. In either case, a philosopher’s style is ultimately not integral to the position which he advances.