Introduction: Hopes and Warnings

Abstract

As I have said in the Preface, this book is supposed to help the general reader in a practical way. But it is written within a particular discipline or type of thought, the discipline of analytical philosophy. My experience is that this discipline is unknown, even mysterious, to most people: the reasons for pursuing it, and the way it works, need explaining. So this is what I shall briefly do here. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to do it without sounding patronising, didactic and long-winded (and of course totally boring to philosophers and others who already know all about it, who are perhaps not quite as many as those who think they know all about it). I apologise for that in advance; but not abjectly, since it really is important to get clear about what sort of business we are in, and whether I have got the style or tone right is by comparison trivial. I should also apologise for leaving many issues untouched; but I have gone into all this more fully elsewhere (Wilson 1986), and have to be brief here.