Abstract

Some time in the 1950’s I was invited to address a meeting of the English Institute which took place at Columbia University and, while I have but a dim recollection of the topic, a point came up in the discussion which I still remember very well and it bears very closely on the subject of this essay. I had said something in my opening remarks about how technical recent philosophy had become and what a formidable language was growing up around it. In the audience was Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the distinguished literary scholar and author of, among others, that delightful book about science and literature, Newton Demands the Muse. She took the occasion to tell us that in her student days she could read and profit from philosophical works—Locke, Bergson, James—and went on to say that in her opinion any intelligent person could read these authors and others without having, as we would now say, “majored” in philosophy. She added, however, that she found herself no longer able to read with much comprehension the writing of the philosophers of the time because of the remoteness of the issues from concrete experience and the esoteric language in which they were presented. What Nicholson was perceiving, perhaps without knowing the background, was the about-face in philosophy that was taking place at the time. Largely in response to the charge that philosophy, unlike science, was making no “progress,” many philosophers decided to limit philosophy to areas—logic, semantics, semiotics—in which it was believed that progress was possible. One result was the abandoning of all the undeniably vague and stubborn issues—God, the self, freedom and determinism, values and facts and the like —that resist solutions of a scientific sort. Unfortunately for philosophers, these are the matters that interest everyone most.