INTRODUCTION

What I have to offer here are some thoughts about the “research ethic,” and the ethics of research, in philosophy. There won't be any exciting stuff about the political wisdom or otherwise of research into racial differences in intelligence, or the ethics of scientists' treatment of laboratory animals, or moral issues concerning genetic engineering or nuclear technology, or anything of that kind. There will be only, besides some rather dry analysis of what constitutes genuine inquiry and how the real thing can come to be corrupted, some rather uncomfortable reflections about the present condition of philosophy, its causes and its consequences.

You are probably beginning to suspect already that I don't think philosophy is at present in a particularly desirable condition. You are correct; at any rate, when I read C. S. Peirce's wry complaints about philosophers “whom any discovery that brought quietus to a vexed question would evidently vex because it would end the fun of arguing around it and about it and over it”—and his descriptions of metaphysics as “a puny, rickety and scrofulous science,” and of philosophy as in “a lamentably crude condition”—I don't feel moved to protest, “Yes, but that was then, whereas now …”