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2 results

  • 28 - Plain English: Essays and Analytic Philosophy

  • from Part III - Assaying Culture, Education, Reform
  • Edited by Denise Gigante, Stanford University, California, Jason Childs
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the British Essay
    Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024, pp 421-436

  • Summary

    The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.

  • No such thing as society: Thatcher, Wittgenstein and the philosophy of social science

  • Gavin Kitching
  • Journal:
    The Economic and Labour Relations Review / Volume 31 / Issue 4 / December 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 January 2023, pp. 565-583
    • Article
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  • This article argues that society is not a thing. It is abbreviated and adapted with permission from a public lecture, titled There Is No Such Thing as Society: Margaret Thatcher, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Social Science. The original was presented by Gavin Kitching to the Cuadernos de la Catedra Ludwig Wittgenstein at Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, in March 2019.