Collingwood’s criticism of analytic philosophy is essentially an accusation of ahistoricality and implicit dogmatism. Russell and Moore, who are Collingwood’s primary targets, had a theory of analysis that would clarify sentences by situating them in the context of all possible expressive power. This strategy is what I call single-commitment tracking. Collingwood argues that there is no way of providing a non-dogmatic account of the constitutive features of a single-commitment tracking account. Instead, Collingwood adopts multi-commitment tracking, in which an expressed commitment set has its constitutive features, which Collingwood calls “absolute presuppositions,” made explicit by an expressing commitment set. This achieves the clarity desired by analytic philosophy, but also introduces something which itself is uninterpreted. So, there is no explicatable context of all possible expressive power, and Collingwood has shown that it is only by engaging in this method of explicating absolute presuppositions, which he calls metaphysics, that new expressive power is unlocked.

This chapter places Carnap in the history of twentieth-century philosophy by pointing out different tensions in canon formation of philosophy. It also introduces key concepts and notions of the volume, along with chapter summaries.

Having accepted a measure of truth in all the religions discussed, and sometimes that the greater truth lies elsewhere than in present Christian conviction, this final chapter considers what implications might follow. The first section develops a model for revelation that parallels certain philosophical approaches to ethics and aesthetics, arguing that cultural constraints are enriching in the way they ensure beliefs arise at the most effective period and place. The central section discusses the two areas where eastern and western religions appear most opposed. The claim that the divine is both personal and impersonal is defended, while some challenges to the reality of the world within Christianity are found to parallel eastern ideas. A final section then contends that the history of religion can be seen to be concerned with creative transformations both in the past and in the future. As examples from the past Buddhism’s move from no-self to interdependence is considered, alongside Christianity’s from hierarchy to kenosis

Must We Mean What We Say? is the first and only work in contemporary thought to carry the project of ordinary language philosophy through to its end. It thereby confronts and overcomes the harsh criticisms of ordinary language philosophy that began with Gellner’s attack in 1959, belying repeated claims that the tradition is “dead.” MWM shows that ordinary language philosophy is more than ever alive and relevant. Cavell’s emphasis on the “voice of the ordinary” responds to the risk of skepticism, that loss of or distancing from the world that film also explores (see The World Viewed). In Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell offers us new ways to explore the relation between an individual speaker and her community, the possibility of revolution in philosophy, and the sense in which our relation to our own words figures our relations to ourselves: the question of self-knowledge and voice.

The revolutionary significance of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell’s first book and the best introduction to his thought, becomes increasingly evident fifty years after its publication, confronting us with newly relevant, transformative thinking about modernism, the idea of culture, ordinary language philosophy, the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, American philosophy, the 1960s, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Kant, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Shakespeare, and such eternal philosophical themes as truth, passion, utterance, self-knowledge, skepticism, and the value of criticism. Cavell’s intervention in ordinary language philosophy revolutionized its practice, overcoming its dogmas and challenging the analytic tradition from within, broadening its audiences. His focus on self-confrontation as central to philosophical practice, the shepherding of ordinary utterances into uses within forms of life, shows that the philosophical preconditions of democratic thinking lie in the embedding of meaning in everyday life, rooted in the ethical and aesthetic aspects of how we mean what we say.

This chapter introduces basic notions and questions about meaning, reference, content, truth, truth conditions, and context-sensitivity in semantic theories of natural languages.

Stoppard’s fascination with philosophy spans his whole career, from early pieces like Jumpers and Dogg’s Hamlet to Darkside and The Hard Problem. Though he was extraordinarily conversant in the disciplinary questions of British analytic philosophy, even striking up correspondences with some of its leading figures, Stoppard also always harboured reservations as to philosophy’s utility and insight, finding it in many cases insufficient compared to the depth of human exploration available in the theatre.

“The Current State of Philosophy in the United States“ begins by asking why the sense of crisis prevalent within the contemporary humanities seems absent from American philosophy departments. Rorty proposes that this is because these departments are largely analytic and analytic philosophy does not consider itself a humanistic discipline. He then traces that view to the logical positivists’ attempt to put philosophy on the secure path of a science by developing a rigorous method of conceptual analysis. He argues that while the project of conceptual analysis had collapsed, analytic philosophy retained a sense of being a science and its sense of superiority to other traditions in philosophy and other humanistic fields. Finally, he proceeds to show some negative consequences of the dominance of this model in American philosophy departments by comparing analytic philosophy with continental philosophy and putting it in a larger academic and social context. Among the consequences are a growing isolation from other academic fields, as well as the insufficient attention analytic philosophy gives to philosophy written in languages other than English, to the history of philosophy, and to questions of social justice.

In this chapter, I first examine two metaphors – the astral and the entomological – that extend through Nietzsche’s entire corpus to track the development of certain key themes in Nietzsche’s metaphilosophical reflections as they evolved from the early days of his professorship at Basel up to the mature writings of 1886 and 1887. By then, I argue, Nietzsche’s metaphilosophical meditations had crystallized around his critique of the so-called will to truth. I then argue that key to this critique is Nietzsche’s conviction that philosophical “knowledge” is not just different in kind to the type of knowledge produced by scholars and scientists, but that the two have contrary properties. Finally, I make use of these results to mount a Nietzschean metaphilosophical critique of the now prominent analytical reception of Nietzsche. A sizable share of contemporary English-language philosophical work on Nietzsche, I argue, is not just metaphilosophically discontinuous with Nietzsche’s understanding of and approach to philosophy, but expressive of deep-set resistance to precisely those transformations in philosophy that Nietzsche sought to bring about as an engaged metaphilosopher.

Having so introduced and discussed my substantive conception of legal obligation, I will conclude my argument by presenting and elaborating on the specific methodological principles and assumptions that underpin the revisionary Kantian conception. Those principles and assumptions, I will contend in Chapter 10, shape a specific methodology – I will call it the method of ‘presuppositional interpretation’ – that is akin, but irreducible, to methods traditionally used in legal and political philosophy, such as conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, transcendental argument, and Kant’s analytic method. As a distinctive method of inquiry, presuppositional interpretation describes a process through which we identify (a) the defining traits of legal obligation and (b) the essential presuppositions that make it possible for us to even conceive of legal obligation, in such a way as to (c) provide a systematic and coherent scheme for interpreting the fundamental features of legal obligation and its basic conditions of intelligibility.