More than four years ago I ventured to put forward some ideas about the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The publication, within the last year or two, of a number of important books of Wittgensteiniana has seemed to offer a good occasion for reviewing this earlier essay. The present article proposes to assess these books and, in the light of them to reconsider the writer’s earlier interpretation of Wittgenstein, as well as to embark on a more ambitious study of Wittgenstein’s later (...) thought. I shall begin with some general remarks about the books in question. (shrink)

CHARLES LESLIE STEVENSON, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the University of Michigan, though an American, has an important place in the evolution of British ethics in this century. It was in Mind that his first papers on ethics were published in 1937-8. They had considerable influence in Britain in promoting the emotive-persuasive theory of moral language. The author of the theory that much of philosophy and ethics is persuasive rhetoric, was himself a plausible illustration of his own theory. His breeziness (...) of style seemed to sweep difficulties out of the way. His papers had an unconventionality which appealed all the more to the younger generation of philosophers because it shocked the older. He seemed to discredit critics by not appearing able to understand the archaic language they were talking. The ideas of these early papers were taken up into a book, Ethics and Language published in 1944. The book is more ponderous and indeed somewhat pedantic. In it, Stevenson’s ideas lose in freshness what they gain in professorial gravity. But the impressive size of the book, the number and variety of the examples of moral argument which it discussed, the apparently wide range of the treatment, made the book for some time a sort of bible of emotivism. The book was also important as the first major study of ethics based on the neo-Wittgensteinian slogan that moral philosophy is the analysis of moral language. (shrink)

Too much is claimed for this book by its title and by the blurb. The essays published in it were prepared in connection with a course of lectures, organized by the British Council, for non-British philosophy teachers, and held at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the summer of 1953. The course was a good one; but it did not amount to an adequate picture of British Philosophy in 1953; and it is too much to claim that “it is not only an authoritative (...) review of some of the outstanding recent developments in British Philosophy, but also a significant contribution to these developments.” As a record of what the most vocal British philosophers are saying to-day, it is not so helpful as the less pretentious B.B.C. and Oxford symposia, The Revolution in Philosophy, and The Nature of Metaphysics. As a guide to what is going on in British philosophy to-day, it compares very unfavourably with H. D. Lewis’s symposium, Contemporary British Philosophy. (shrink)

Mr. Mure, the Warden of Merton, does not conceal his entire lack of sympathy with contemporary British, and particularly Oxford, philosophy. His last words are: “At present, if I had an intelligent son coming up to Oxford, I should not regret it if he turned his face away from all the three Honours Schools that include philosophy, even from Greats.” Such words are not lightly spoken by a man whose life has been bound up with philosophy and with Oxford. He (...) was University lecturer in philosophy from 1929 to 1937, and has been Warden of Merton since 1947. He has written two works on Aristotle and two on Hegel: an Introduction to Hegel and A Study of Hegel’s Logic. He obviously belongs, therefore, to a different generation and a different philosophical world from that of contemporary Oxford teachers of philosophy. Judging the latter by the standards of his own generation and tradition, he finds their work devoid of all virtue or value. (shrink)

There have in recent years been various indications of dissatisfaction with certain trends in current Oxford and Cambridge philosophy. There has been a feeling that detailed analyses of minute particulars has led to neglect of some broader and more pervasive issues. It has been realised that certain problems are distorted when isolated for analytic purposes from their living context. Thus, the problem of the self has been treated exclusively as a logical, linguistic or epistemological problem, without reference to the awareness (...) of self in moral experience. The problems of self-consciousness, of personal identity and of memory have been treated as cognitive problems, without reference to action, intention or project as modes of experience of self-continuity through time. In general, philosophy of mind has been separated from philosophy of morals. In turn, philosophy of morals has been developed as if it had to do with ‘stands’ or decisions not with reasoning; or as if it concerned the meaning of sentences, not the meaning of human life. (shrink)

Just two hundred years ago David Hume, concluding his Natural History of Religion, wrote: ‘The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment, appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning this subject.’ Nevertheless, he went on, ‘such is the frailty of human reason and such the irresistible contagion of opinion’ that the sceptical attitude which reason calls for could scarcely be upheld unless we set the various species of superstition a–quarrelling among (...) one another, ‘while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm though obscure regions of philosophy’. Hume’s fault was to have accepted the rationalists’ narrow interpretation of reason; to have conceded their identification of philosophy with Cartesian clarity and geometric rigour. Hume’s merit was to have appealed from this inhuman reason to human nature, from this arid rationalism to humanism. But much of what he says in the name of human nature and against rationalistic ‘reason’ should have been said in the name of human reason adequately considered. The dilemma which haunted him—philosophy or life, reason or belief—originated in his failure to criticise radically enough the rationalist conceptions of reason and of philosophy. This failure is reflected in the opposition he sets up between the ‘inexplicable mystery’ of religion and the ‘calm though obscure regions of philosophy’. The calling in question of this opposition is one of the features of much contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This book represents the text of six lectures delivered by Canon Van Steenberghen in the Queen’s University, Belfast in May 1953, under the auspices of the Department of Scholastic Philosophy. As an introduction to the evolution of philosophical thought in the thirteenth century, it could hardly be bettered. It not merely states conclusions; it communicates the excitement of intellectual enquiry and discovery. It is a report of work in progress, with the challenge of work still remaining to be done. It (...) makes the reader participant of an absorbing debate, in which the author joins issue with eminent medieval scholars in elucidating some central problems of the history of scholasticism and their relevance to contemporary Thomism. The debate continues; but on many points the reader will have no doubt that Professor Van Steenberghen’s theses are définitivement acquises. (shrink)

Someone called A. N. Whitehead “the latest and greatest of the Cambridge Platonists”. That the tradition of Platonic scholarship still survives in Cambridge is evidenced by the appearance of these two books, one by the veteran Professor Hackforth, the other by the young scholar, Mr. John Gould. As produced by the University Press, both are examples of British book-making at its best.

This book justifies its title as a ‘modern’ introduction to its subject because it raises most of the problems of ethics as this is usually treated in contemporary British Universities, and gives the reader a good idea both of the content and of the language and manner of ethical discussions in this particular university world. The author remarks on the national restriction of the book’s scope. He says: ‘The sort of philosophy to which this is an introduction is speciflcally the (...) sort of philosophy that is at present generally practised in this country’. He observes, quite justly that ‘British philosophy is for the most part so very different in style, assumption and method from most philosophy on the continent that it would be impossible to embark upon them both at once’. This admission that British philosophy is not equivalent to ‘philosophy’ sans phrase is somewhat rare, and is welcome. (shrink)

In a Preface, the translator says: “This is a translation of all of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’être et le Néant.” She earned hard and earned well the right to make this satisfied statement. It was a task of intimidating dimensions. Sartre’s vocabulary and style, in this, his major philosophical opus, are grim, graceless and disheartening. Seldom has the French language had to suffer so much in giving birth to a philosopher’s ideas. American translations of the minor works, hitherto available, have sometimes (...) had the effect of making the obscure absurd; their explanatory introductions have sometimes been quite silly. Of Miss Barnes’s translation, it must be said that she has succeeded admirably in being both accurate and readable. She has not just transposed Sartre’s words but his thought into an English which “reads English” and not just transliterated French, and which makes Sartre not less understandable in translation than he was in the original. Where the translation remains barely intelligible, the fault is not hers. The Introduction, too, is of high quality and gives us, in forty pages, an intelligent exposition and acute appraisal of Sartre’s ontology which compares favourably with anything hitherto written about Sartre in English. There is a useful and accurate glossary of technical terms of Sartrean philosophy and a Name Index which give the English volume important advantages over the French. (shrink)

This book, splendidly produced by Messrs. Nelson, comes to us from beyond the tomb. The great platonist whose text it is died in 1945. The present work is a first selection from a set of unpublished papers by him, which were deposited in Edinburgh University Library after his death. These papers are mainly translations and studies of the later Platonic dialogues, commencing with the Theaetetus. They represent the author’s labours in the years 1933-4, following the publication of his ‘magnum opus’, (...) Plato, the Man and his Work and of his translations of Timaeus and Critias ; Parmenides and Laws. The author’s own intention had been to publish the translations of the Sophistes, Politicus and Philebus together. The editor and publishers have in this edition decided to bring out the Philebus and Epinomis in one volume, leaving the Sophistes and Politicus for later publication. The long introduction to the Philebus is from the pen of A. E. Taylor himself; the introduction to the Epinomis has been supplied by A. C. Lloyd. (shrink)

Dr. Ewing’s ‘first thoughts’ in moral philosophy were presented in their most complete form in his Definition of Good, published in 1947. This book is one of the best presentations and ablest defences of ethical objectivism in recent English philosophy. Its critique of Naturalism and of Subjectivism was one of its strongest features. Naturalism was rejected because it amounted to the abolition of ethics and its replacement by descriptive science. Against this Dr. Ewing maintained the irreducibility of ethical to non-ethical (...) terms. (shrink)

This magistral volume replaces Dom Lottin’s Principes de Morale, published in two volumes in 1947. Every student of scholastic moral theology and ethics will thank the venerable Benedictine scholar for having given them the matter of the earlier volumes in the more convenient format of a single volume, with one table of contents and a single alphabetical index, and with a better arrangement of matter and certain important additional studies.