Commitments and Language

Abstract

As I complete these pages, I find myself feeling disturbed. I have been talking in ways that go counter to much of contemporary philosophical fashion. Much of what I have said will be denounced as “old fashioned” and this will be because I have dared to consider problems that remain to plague us but are no longer as dominant in the literature as they once were. The philosophical world has become densely populated and with this increase in practicing and professing philosophers, has come the divisions and estrangements that are inevitable among large populations. The philosophical world seems to be divided along geographical lines in a way this is quite disconcerting and basically provincial. The United States and Great Britain have espoused a type of linguistic empiricism that derives from Hume, the Vienna Circle, Russell, and Moore. Much of the European continent has taken to one form or another of so-called Existentialism deriving from Kierkegaard, Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre. The Far East is struggling to achieve some sort of unity between its theological mysticism and a form of neoHegelianism. And, of course, the Soviet orbit is immersed in the official dogma of Dialectical Materialism fathered by Marx and developed by Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.