Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Permissions
- Acknowledgements
- Preface to this edition
- Preface to updated edition of Must We Mean What We Say?
- Foreword: An audience for philosophy
- 1 Must we mean what we say?
- 2 The availability of Wittgenstein's later philosophy
- 3 Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy
- 4 Austin at criticism
- 5 Ending the waiting game: A reading of Beckett's Endgame
- 6 Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation
- 7 Music discomposed
- 8 A matter of meaning it
- 9 Knowing and acknowledging
- 10 The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear
- Thematic index
- Index of names
1 - Must we mean what we say?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Permissions
- Acknowledgements
- Preface to this edition
- Preface to updated edition of Must We Mean What We Say?
- Foreword: An audience for philosophy
- 1 Must we mean what we say?
- 2 The availability of Wittgenstein's later philosophy
- 3 Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy
- 4 Austin at criticism
- 5 Ending the waiting game: A reading of Beckett's Endgame
- 6 Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation
- 7 Music discomposed
- 8 A matter of meaning it
- 9 Knowing and acknowledging
- 10 The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear
- Thematic index
- Index of names
Summary
That what we ordinarily say and mean may have a direct and deep control over what we can philosophically say and mean is an idea which many philosophers find oppressive. It might be argued that in part the oppression results from misunderstanding, that the new philosophy which proceeds from ordinary language is not that different from traditional methods of philosophizing, and that the frequent attacks upon it are misdirected. But I shall not attempt to be conciliatory, both because I think the new philosophy at Oxford is critically different from traditional philosophy, and because I think it is worth trying to bring out their differences as fully as possible. There is, after all, something oppressive about a philosophy which seems to have uncanny information about our most personal philosophical assumptions (those, for example, about whether we can ever know for certain of the existence of the external world, or of other minds; and those we make about favorite distinctions between “the descriptive and the normative,” or between matters of fact and matters of language) and which inveterately nags us about them. Particularly oppressive when that philosophy seems so often merely to nag and to try no special answers to the questions which possess us—unless it be to suggest that we sit quietly in a room. Eventually, I suppose, we will have to look at that sense of oppression itself: such feelings can come from a truth about ourselves which we are holding off.
My hopes here are modest. I shall want to say why, in my opinion, some of the arguments Professor Mates brings against the Oxford philosophers he mentions are on the whole irrelevant to their main concerns. And this will require me to say something about what I take to be the significance of proceeding, in one's philosophizing, from what we ordinarily say and mean. That will not be an easy thing to do without appearing alternately trivial and dogmatic. Perhaps that is only to be expected, given the depth and the intimacy of conflict between this way of proceeding in philosophy and the way I take Mates to be following.
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- Must We Mean What We Say?A Book of Essays, pp. 1 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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