Abstract

This useful paperback reprints a 1934 introduction to the analytic method in philosophy according to its pre-war Cambridge usage. Professor Wisdom provides a refreshing statement of analysis in general and its customary British application to the problems of mind and body, which it tries to reduce to mental events and sense-data respectively. Incidental light is cast upon free-will, the interaction of mind and body and perception, with particular references to the views of Moore and Stout. The author now evaluates this historic perspective summarily: ‘The book is clear, correct, cogent and boring except for a few places where it is not clear and correct’ but ‘an instructive failure’.