Abstract

Part of the point of this article is to support the following claim by Adorno: “Rarely has anyone laid out a theory of philosophical clarity; instead, the concept of clarity has been used as though it were self-evident.”¹ In fact, and again with Adorno, I shall argue for what I call the “loadedness thesis”: the thesis that philosophical conceptions of clarity are pervasively, and perhaps inevitably, philosophically partisan (section one). Yet I shall proceed to argue for a conception of clarity nonetheless (section two). Such clarity I take as “default clarity,” in that, while there could be reason to eschew…