Ernst a Moody-The Age of Analysis

The Age of AnalysisAuthor(s): Ernest A. MoodySource: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 37 (1963 -1964), pp. 53-67Published by: American Philosophical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3219646 .Accessed: 09/10/2014 12:48

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Th Age of Analysis* ERNEST A. MOODY

The distinction between what is called critical or analytical philosophy, and what is known as speculative philosophy, has been drawn primarily by those whose sympathies were on the side of the analytical method. Some forty years ago, in the introductory chapter of his book, Scientific Thought, C. D. Broad described Critical Philosophy as "the analysis and definition of our fundamental concepts, and the clear statement and resolute criticism of our fundamental beliefs."' Specula- tive Philosophy, said to be "more exciting" and "what the layman generally understands by the name," was described by Broad in the following terms:

Its object is to take over the results of the various sciences, to add to them the results of the religious and ethical experiences of mankind, and then to reflect upon the whole. The hope is that, by this means, we may be able to reach some general conclusions as to the nature of the universe, and as to our position and prospects in it.2

With respect to speculative philosophy he adds "If it is to be of the slightest use it must presuppose Critical Philosophy."3 The view expressed by Broad is, I think, representative of the attitude which has dominated British and American philosophy during the past thirty or forty years.

I propose this evening to indulge in some speculative philoso- phizing, not however about the universe and what hope it holds for mankind, but about the critical or analytical philosophy of our age, and what grounds for optimism or pessimism it offers with regard to the future of philosophy. I wish in particular to examine the assumption, so generally held, that speculative philosophy, to be of value, must presuppose critical philosophy. My own view is that the converse relationship is nearer the truth.

*Presidential address delivered before the Thirty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association at the Miramar Hotel, Santa Monica, California, December 27-29, 1963. 1C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought, New York, 1927, p. 18. 21bid., p. 20. 3lbid., p. 20.

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I. Since the time when Broad wrote his Scientific Thought, the

enterprise which he called Critical Philosophy has acquired a somewhat narrower sense, and has developed more specialized conceptions of its method and subject matter. Instead of talking about critical ex- amination of fundamental beliefs, and about definitions of the concepts involved in them, we now talk about analysis of the language in which our beliefs and concepts are expressed-if indeed any difference is admitted between language and something expressed by it. For the past twenty or thirty years philosophy has come to be characterized as the logical analysis of language, the term 'logical' being taken in a sense broad enough to include not only the syntactical structure of language, but also its properties of meaning and truth. Syntactical structure, in turn, is taken to include not only the part corresponding to formal logic, but it is taken by many to include also the grammatical syntax of so-called "ordinary languages"-the most ordinary being, apparently, our own English idiom.

The obvious virtue of defining philosophy as language analysis is that it provides philosophers with a subject matter distinct from those belonging to the special sciences. The subject matter of philosophy is not, as was once thought, the universe, being qua being, God and the soul, or even the good and the bad or the right and the wrong. It is, rather, the language used by those who talk about such matters. This discovery has served to ease some misgivings which we, as professors and presumed experts in something, have had with respect to our calling. We need no longer worry about being in competition with physicists, social scientists, psychologists, or even moralists and theologians, on their own ground. Our job is to talk about the language they use, rather than to use it to talk about their subject matters. Nor is this as much of a surrender of territory as it seems, for although it belongs to them to say what is true about the world and man, it belongs to us to say what their statements mean. So far, so good. Our own difficulties arise when we face the task of interpreting the language we use in interpreting the language they use-when we try to determine the meaning of 'meaning.' It appears that preoccupation with this problem, on the meta-meta-level, takes so much of our time that we have little to spare for the original task of analyzing the languages used by our colleagues in other departments.

The analytical movement of the present century did not start out, in a conscious manner, as a language game. It commenced as a common sense reaction against the metaphysical logomachies that had stemmed

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from Hegel and that had run into dialectical paradoxes in Bradley, McTaggart, and Royce. The revolt against idealism is generally associated with the names of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and with the American New Realists and pragmatists of the period prior to World War One. These men were more concerned with the analysis of facts, or of what is presented in experience, than with analysis of the ways in which facts are stated. Yet the relevance of the ways of stating them, to the "hard data" (or, for the pragmatists, the "soft data") that verified the statements, was quickly recognized. The dis- tinctive features, however, of this early stage of analytical philosophy were its quest for an elementary bed-rock for empirical knowledge, and its preference for piecemeal analysis over the attempt to formulate general theories. The founders of contemporary analytical philosophy were, for the most part, realists-men who believed that it is possible to discover constituents and basic structural features of the world, not merely of the language in which we talk about the world.

What operated to shift the emphasis to language was the new logic stemming from Frege and developed in Principia Mathmatica. This was used as an instrument for exhibiting the "logical form" of sentences, so that their empirical content and truth conditions could be made explicit. Two main purposes were served by such logical analysis of sentences. One was that of eliminating supposed philosophical difficulties that could be shown to arise from confusion of grammatical with logical form. Russell's use of his theory of descriptions, to get rid of Meinong's golden mountain, was a case of this sort. But a second use, which Russell considered philosophically important, was that of inferring, from the syntactical structure of language, basic structural traits of the world. This was an ontological as well as an empirical realism, which Russell developed in his philosophy of Logical Atomism, and which he never completely abandoned.

The ontology involved in Russell's philosophy was eliminated by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, through a reduction of philosophical discourse to statements about the expressions of empirical language and about the rules governing the logical syntax of language. In keeping with this view, logical positivism proclaimed the thesis that the only subject matter of philosophy is language. The task of philosophy, according to this school, is two-fold: a therapeutic task of showing that metaphysical sentences are cognitively meaningless, being generated by a logical mistake; and a positive task of formulating the logical syntax of the language of science. Carnap's Logische Aufbau der Welt, followed by his Logical Syntax of Language, were architec-

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tonic works of this new Enlightenment, which supervened on the piecemeal type of analysis that had been pursued by Russell and Moore. These works offered a non-metaphysical answer to the old Kantian question of how a science of physics is possible. The other Kantian question, of how pure mathematics is possible, had already been taken care of by Russell and Whitehead, on the basis of Frege's work.

In the period of the 1930's Logical Positivism seemed like a new Auf/ldrung. The enthusiastic disciples of the movement were confident that the few remaining problems, like that of counter-factual condi- tionals, or that of reduction sentences to take care of unobservable entities posited in physics, would soon be solved. It was a great time to be young, partly because of the fun of using the new ammunition on recalcitrant die-hards, but chiefly because it seemed like a clean sweep- ing away of the fuzzy cobwebs that had plagued philosophy through- out its history. Fortunately for those of us who had chosen philosophy as a life-long career, the broom didn't get all the cobwebs cleaned up; otherwise we might have been liquidated along with the problems we were hired to solve.

While logical positivism was seeking to resolve its remaining problems by calling in semantics to help out syntax, a heresy and schism led by Ludwig Wittgenstein established a new approach, scan- dalously informal, to language analysis. The appropriate subject matter of philosophical analysis, according to this school, is not the formalized and regimented language constructed by logicans, but plain everyday language. And the method of analysis is not based on the assumption that words can be given univocal senses, or that there is a basic syntax that reflects the structure of facts; it is, rather, a "plain historical method" consisting of a descriptive analysis of the way language expressions behave in varying contexts. The slogan of this school is Wittgenstein's statement that "meaning is use."

There is a certain kinship between the program of ordinary language analysis, and that of pragmatism, to the extent that meaning and truth are construed in relation to purpose and not merely with reference to extra-linguistic facts purportedly stated by sentences. Some have also noted a further kinship between ordinary language analysis and the phenomenological description of the Lebenswelt pursued by continental philosophers, since this method also seeks to develop an empiricism without ontology. It is not, in any case, a realistic empiricism such as that of Russell or Moore, since it drops out the common sense ontology associated with the correspondence theory of truth, which kept language from being a self-contained world.

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The influence of Wittgenstein, and of the doctrine of contextual meaning, has been felt within the camp of the formalist school. This is noticeable in Quine's philosophical writings of the past ten years. Here it provides a method of handling the distinction between meaning and reference without abandoning the nominalistic antipathy to intentional entities. But it tends to have the effect of making ontology, or the theory of objects, something of a pragmatic myth. The way this comes about is, roughly, as follows: If we reject objects of meaning, as Platonic entities to be eliminated by Ockham's razor, we are at a loss to explain synonymity; but without a criterion of synonymity, we have no criterion of analyticity; and if we cannot make sense of analyticity, we cannot make any clear distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. But if we cannot do this, we cannot isolate a purely factual component of our knowledge, free from interpretation deter- mined by the grammatical structure of our particular language-a structure that is as provincial as the cultural outlook and habits of our particular society and time. So in this way the type of realism repre- sented by Russell is once more abandoned, because no inferences can be drawn from the structure of language to the structure of the external world, or indeed from the structure of one natural language to that of alternative languages that might equally well ride the flux of sensory stimuli. Subtract the realm of essence from Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith, and something very much like Quine's Word and Object is what remains.

As we survey this half century of analytical philosophy we can say, I believe, that it has traveled a good distance from its origins. From Moore's common sense realism to the Oxford analysis of ordinary language is a big shift; and from Russell's logical atomism to Quine's "logical pragmatism" (if I may so characterize it) is perhaps an equally big shift. The tendency has been toward treating language as a self-contained world which cannot be linked, at any particular point, to the external world in which we all believe.

We find ourselves in somewhat the same position as the theologians of the later fourteenth century, whose theological language had turned out to be another self-contained world which could not be tied to the object of religious belief. The outcome of the mediaeval Age of Analysis was called scepticism. Its residual language game, which continued to be played within secluded university walls for two centuries, came to be scorned and derided by a society that had turned elsewhere to re-establish contact with the realities language is supposed to describe. Is a similar fate awaiting our Age of Analysis? There are many voices

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heard, from various quarters, which proclaim this as our fate, even reviving the old term 'scholasticism' to make their point clear. Let us consider some of their criticisms of our enterprise, and speculate on this little matter of our human destiny as philosophers.

II. There is one type of criticism directed against analytical philosophy

which, in the light of C. D. Broad's way of distinguishing critical from speculative philosophy, is to be expected. This is the criticism of our enterprise on the ground that it fails to provide answers to the religious needs, and to the moral and political problems, of our society. Such criticism attacks the conception of philosophy as analysis, rather than the way in which we are carrying out the analytical enterprise; the demand is that we should drop analysis and go in for speculative philosophy as Broad defined it. It is not that we omit courses in philosophy of religion, or in ethical and even political philosophy, from our curricula; the objection is that in these courses we by-pass the real problems besetting mankind in these areas, the deep lying human concerns and anxieties and perplexities. Instead, we apply logic to theological arguments and exhibit their invalidity, and in the courses on moral philosophy we analyze ethical judgments and show that they are cognitively meaningless or that they are equivalent to imperative sentences or to reports on one's emotional state. And if we take up the classical ethical theories, we convince the student, by the time he has finished the course, that none of them is dependable as a guide to the decisions that have to be made in life. If, to these complaints, we answer that it is our business to examine beliefs in terms of their evidence and rationality, and not in terms of how good they make us feel, our answer is understood; but the conclusion is then drawn that rationality is not enough.

I do not think that we should be too complacent about these criticisms, even if we do not feel that they are, in principle, justified. They indicate that that to which we are applying our analytical talents is remote from the problems and subjects concerning which the edu- cated public, and our own students, turn to us for help. It is not our method alone that repels, but the fact that we are more interested in illustrating it, in simple and often trivial examples, than in applying it to the more significant and difficult problems. This is pardonable for logic courses and formal studies; but where the analytical method is of the "ordinary language" variety, and the subject matter is, for example, moral responsibility, confinement to trivial cases-like break-

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ing a promise to give a child ice cream-indicates more interest in illustrating a method than in applying it to the analysis of the problems it is supposed to clarify or resolve.

There is another aspect to this situation which is, I think, of significance. When I was an undergraduate, forty years ago, the dis- solving effects of sophisticated analysis had not yet shaken the con- fidence of teachers of ethics in the ethical theories they chose to teach. Compared to the conventional justifications of right action and right living, that boys pick up from parents and church-going aunts, the classical ethical theories impressed us more by their strength and rationality than by their deficiencies and weaknesses; they filled a void to an extent sufficient to make philosophy seem a better guide to life than the patent medicines purveyed on the black markets. I am not sure that this is the case today, when what is learned in ethics courses is the inadequacy of ethical theories to stand the test of analysis and meaning. A sign of the times is the immense enrollment that a course in existentialism, or on the "philosophy of man," now has. Thirty or forty years ago it was the courses in analytical philosophy that drew the big attendance, and the courses in romantic philosophy (which included Nietzsche even if not Kierkegaard) had little attrac- tion. The roles are now reversed: analysis is old hat, but for the newer generation philosophical romanticism is a revolutionary movement in which one should sign up. The reason analysis has become old hat, for the students, is the fact that it finished its business of disposing of speculative philosophy some time back, and has had nothing much to analyze, since then, other than itself.

Criticisms bearing on the inadequacy of current analytical philosophy to meet the moral and social problems of mankind come not only from off campus, and from students, but also from professional colleagues. Professor Paul Schilpp, before the meeting of the Western Division of our Association five years ago, gave a presidential address which he entitled The Abdication of Philosophy. We who teach philosophy, he said, have specific obligations to society, and are living in an age when the atomic bomb threatens to annihilate the human race. Yet if one reads the articles published by philosophers in their professional journals, one finds no evidence of any concern over this "impending doom."

Once upon a time a Plato wrote The Republic and The Laws, St. Augustine penned his City of God, Sir Thomas More his Utopia, Kant his Perpetual Peace, and even Nietzsche his Zarathustra. By contrast, most 20th century philosophers manage to come as close to that sort of thing as Ethics and Language, which tells

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us a great deal more about language than about ethics. In fact, the big issue which today seems to divide philosophers in the Western world is that between the devotees of ordinary language and those of constructed language systems. Our so-called "lovers of wisdom" appear to think that wisdom applies only to the manipulation of language. . . . We will be linguists, semanticists, symbolists, grammarians-yes, even logicans. But we will not be philosophers!4

I have quoted these remarks not because I share the view that the task of philosophy is to supply solutions to current world crises, but because this type of criticism of philosophy's retreat to language analysis is heard from so many quarters. The literate lay public of our day, insofar as it seeks to enlarge its intellectual horizons by reading current philosophical literature, is faced with the choice of either acquiring a taste for the logical and linguistic subtleties of our professional output, or of undergoing an existentialist therapy of its anxieties and concerns. Wishing to explore problems of religion, of moral decision, and of man's place in the world of nature and society, people see little if any connection between our discussions of logic and language, and these problems. Their attitude toward our philosophical occupations is exactly that of the humanists and religious people of the late mediaeval and renaissance period, toward the scholastics who taught in the universities of Europe. "If you go to the university of Paris," said Gerhard Groot to one of his pupils, "all you will do is learn bad Latin and lose your faith." The attacks on the "philosophers of the schools" by Valla, Vives, Erasmus, and later by Francis Bacon, are well known to us; what we may not fully appreciate is that the very strictures levied against the scholasticism of those times are being directed against us by a large part of the society in which we live-and on almost exactly the same grounds, of triviality, verbalism, and sterility. It is this, perhaps, which spells our "impending doom," more than the atomic bomb.

Criticism of the more recent trends in analytical philosophy also emanates from within the ranks of those who have been closely identified with the age of analysis. Bertrand Russell, surveying the outcome of the movement toward language analysis, to whose earlier phases he had so largely contributed, takes a dim view of the current occupations of professional philosophers. He minces no words in branding the type of philosophy stemming from Wittgenstein's Phi- losophical Investigations as trivial and meaningless. "If this philosophical doctrine is true," he wrote not long ago, "philosophy is, at best,

4Paul A. Schlipp, "The Abdication of Philosophy," in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1958-59, pp. 20-21.

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a slight help to lexicographers, and, at worst, an idle tea-table amuse- ment"5 "It seems to concern itself, not with the world and our relation to it, but only with the different ways in which silly people can say silly things."6 Admittedly Russell's invective is directed only at one segment of current analytical philosophy; but his criticisms of logical positivism, and of pragmatism, for cutting the ties between language and reality, have been scarcely less severe. Russell's views concerning the "ordinary language" enterprise are shared, to an appreciable degree, by many analytical philosophers of the formal school, who feel that nothing significant can be accomplished by replacing the methods of logic with those of grammarians and lexicographers. From across the Atlantic there come, however, some retaliatory criticisms of the logic and semantics of the formal school, as simply irrelevant to the concerns of philosophy.

To the outsider this controversy seems like one between logic and grammar, as rival claimants to the throne of philosophy. The common assumption made by both parties is that philosophy is language analysis. But those who consider it more important for philosophy to deal with "substantive" problems about the world and mankind-problems stated and resolved within language-than to deal with problems that are about language, look on this intramural debate as peripheral, or irrelevant, to philosophy.

III. In response to such criticisms as I have described, analytical philoso-

phers can marshall some persuasive arguments in their own defense. It can be pointed out, in the first place, that the great philosophers of the past, whose methods and goals we are accused of deserting, were really dealing with the same problems that concern us, the difference being that they were using the "material mode of speech" instead of the "formal mode of speech." We have only made explicit the nature of the enterprise in which they were engaged. We can now see that Plato's quest for the archetypal structure of intelligible reality, ordering the sensible flux, was really nothing other than an attempt to formulate the logical syntax and semantical rules of an ideal scientific language. And certainly Aristotle's philosophical work was in large degree an enterprise of language analysis, using both the techniques of ordinary language analysis, and those of construction of semantical systems, for

5Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development, New York, 1959, p. 217.

6lbid., p. 230.

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various domains of investigation. Moreover, it cannot be denied that our method has been fruitful in eliminating many difficulties that were due to confusion of the use and mention of language expressions, such as the apparent contradictions involved in denying that something exists, which gave rise to such queer distinctions as that between existence and subsistence, or between essence and existence.

To this defense the critic can reply that we beg the question by assuming the point at issue-namely, that philosophy is analysis of language. We contend that Plato and Aristotle were mistaken in think- ing that they were talking about the nature and structure of the world; but this contention rests only on our assumption that there is nothing that has that sort of nature and structure, other than language.

The members of the formal school of analysis, whose work has been in the construction of language systems and in the foundations of logic and mathematics, can reply to the accusations of trivality and sterility by pointing to the results achieved by their methods- results of manifest value not only in the development of mathematics, but in the clarification of problems of the empirical sciences. They will readily admit that theirs is an abstract discipline; but they can invoke the testimony of history to show that the progress of science has been chiefly due to the development of abstract theories of mathematical character, adequate for bringing the observational data into intelligible relationship.

To this the critic will reply by conceding the value of formal analysis for mathematics and its scientific applications. But he will say that this is not the point at issue-not, indeed, unless philosophy is to be identified with logic and mathematics, which he will by no means concede.

The ordinary language analyst, for his part, will strenuously object to the charge that philosophical analysis of language is remote from the interests and concerns of mankind. Such charges may indeed apply to the formal school, he will say, but certainly the analysis of ordinary language deals with the concrete concerns of human beings in their environment; and it takes account of valuations, purposes, and all the ramifications of personal and cultural perspectives. How can one come closer to reality than this?

But to this the critic may well reply in this manner: What is philosophical about mere description of how people talk under varying circumstances? Your enterprise is trivial not because it is remote from the facts of life or from human problems, but because it has no principles and arrives at no general conclusions. Empiricism without

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theory is not philosophy, and not science either. It is more like mediaeval alchemy-an experimentalism that gets nowhere because there is nothing to prove or disprove by the experiments. In the area of law and morals, on which you spend much time, you are no doubt adept at presenting concrete situations involving problematic moral decisions; but the main burden of your analysis is that general principles cannot be trusted as guides to right decisions, because every case is different. If you cannot, by your method, stick your finger into the same river twice, it might be well to follow the practice recommended by Cratylus, and indeed restated by your master Wittgenstein- of that whereof one cannot speak, he had better be silent.

Dialogues of this sort could be carried on endlessly. What they suggest to me is that the critics are asking the analytical philosopher to do something that he cannot in good conscience do-return to the "good old way" of some earlier period. And if the analytical philosopher should ask his critic to specify which good old way he should adopt and to tell him how to repair the leaks in the good old ship to make it float, the critic would be hard pressed for an answer. Once the tools of analysis have been applied, the result of the use of those tools cannot be undone.

IV. I turn now to the question I raised in connection with Broad's

statement that speculative philosophy, to be of any use, must presuppose analytical philosophy. I do not believe that this is true. Philosophy has a direction of development, and this direction is not from analysis to synthesis, nor is it from nominalism to realism. In the two full cycles of western philosophical development known to us, the direction went the other way. Ancient Greek philosophy started in Ionia (and in the Greek colonies of southern Italy as well) with a cosmology realistically understood; and the general movement of Greek philosophy was from realism to conceptualism to nominalism, and finally to scepticism. I do not count Neoplatonism as a last stage of ancient philosophy, but as the first cosmological phase of mediaeval philosophy, in which we find a similar movement. Here all phases are exhibited in a sequence of interpretations of the philosophy of Aristotle, start- ing with the initial interpretation effected by the Neoplatonist com- mentators and by Christian and Arab theologians, in terms of an emanationist or creationist cosmology. Within this world-frame we pass, during the next thousand years, from realism to conceptualism to nominalism, and again to scepticism. The modern cycle, finally,

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took off from the new cosmological frame provided by Copernican astronomy and the mechanics of the 17th century. This was realistically interpreted as the world scheme into which man and his concerns had to be fitted, and to which God himself had to be adjusted in one way or another. Probably Kant should be credited with transforming this world scheme into a conceptualist frame, with the further shift to a nominalistic empiricism reserved for our own century. I am here using the terms 'realism,' 'conceptualism,' and 'nominalism' as over-all characterizations, the realist being one who believes that the rational structure accounting for experience is discovered in (or perhaps "be- hind") the world, the conceptualist one who thinks it is attributable to the world but only insofar as the world is an object of thought, and the nominalist locating it in the language systems constructed by man.

In the late mediaeval period the shift to language analysis, and to the nominalistic phase, occurred early in the fourteenth century. This movement was called the "modern method" (via moderna). It was, precisely, the method of formulating and resolving philosophical questions as problems of the logical analysis of language. The Bertrand Russell of the fourteenth century was William of Ockham, and the Principia Mathematica of that age of analysis was Ockham's Summa logicae. Combining logical analysis with a radical empiricism, Ockham wielded his razor on metaphysical entities and distinctions, reducing the "pseudo-object sentences in the material mode of speech" found in Aquinas and Scotus to "syntactical sentences in the formal mode of speech." The development of the Ockhamist movement had many parallels to that of twentieth century logical positivism, and encountered many of the same difficulties in carrying out its program. Yet valuable contributions were made by members of this school to formal logic, and to the mathematical problems involved in the continuity of time and of spatial magnitude. These investigations led to development of the kinematic analysis of uniformly accelerated motion, and to the question- ing of the basic assumptions of Aristotelian physics. Jean Buridan did a very good job of "piecemeal analysis" of projectile motion and of gravitational acceleration. These were positive fruits of the nominalistic phase of mediaeval philosophy; but they had to wait nearly two hundred and fifty years until a new cosmological framework, replacing that of Aristotle, could find use for them.

The nominalist critique of the metaphysical underpinnings of Aristotelian physics and cosmology, as viewed from the standpoint of our modern scientific tradition, looks like progress. But we must re-

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member that the people who lived in the fourteenth century could not foresee the kind of world that was to take the place of the secure cosmos that had been the world horizon of western civilization for a thousand years. To them, it looked like scepticism. More disturbing still was the theological agnosticism consequent on the dissolution of the mediaeval synthesis. The empiricist criterion of meaning, made explicit in the nominalist analysis of cognitive language, exhibited most of the propositions of theology as cognitively meaningless. Robert Holkot, writing in 1331, spared no pains to make this apparent; and he then devoted a long question to the topic, What justification is there for us, as theologians, to hold professional positions in the universities? They had, indeed, analyzed their subject matter out of existence.

The period which we call the Renaissance, and whose art and poetry and works of imagination we so much admire, was funda- mentally an age of philosophical scepticism. The mediaeval world- frame had been dissolved, and no new one, intellectually acceptable, had yet been formed. The religious people of northern Europe, which had been the home of scholastic theology and philosophy, took refuge in mysticism and pietism; the many non-conformist cults of the Refor- mation period were equivalents of the movement now called Existen- tialism-efforts to find, through inner experience, something affirmative that could fill the void left by the cognitive emptying of theology. A second movement, equally expressive of philosophical scepticism and of reaction against the outcome of the scholastic enterprise, was that which is known as humanism. This was a revolt against the "scientific regimentation" of language by the scholastics, in favor of a philo- logical and grammatical concern with language, and of the use of language for the expression of personal attitudes and human experiences, in biographical writing, poetry, history, and essays like those of Montaigne. The Bible was studied as historical literature, rather than as something to be construed in terms of theological doctrine. All this was the renaissance return to "ordinary language," and to empiricism without theory.

Among theoretical disciplines only mathematics attracted talented men, and made some new progress. This is because mathematics does not depend for its principles or its validity on a metaphysical or cosmological foundation. And when, in the course of time, the age of philosophical scepticism came to an end, it was the mathematicians, more than the poets and linguists, who provided the world-frame which was the beginning of modern philosophy. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,

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Descartes, and "the incomparable Mr. Newton," all mathematicians, gave modern philosophy the new "real world" which was to provide both the incentive for analysis, and the subject matter of analysis, in a new cycle of realism, conceptualism, and nominalism.

V. Returning now to our own Age of Analysis, and viewing the state

of philosophy in this year of grace 1963, we may ask where we stand in the historic cycle of modern philosophy, and what grounds for optimism or for pessimism, with respect to the future of our discipline, we may find. There seem to be many symptoms to indicate that our age of analysis has brought us to a point comparable to that of six hundred years ago, when the cosmological and metaphysical framework, within which philosophers had worked for a thousand years, had been dissolved beyond repair. We can find these symptoms within our own departments of philosophy, in which there seems to be a growing divergence between those who pursue formal logic and mathematical studies, those who pursue "ordinary" philosophical analysis, and those who abjure the analytical approach to philosophy altogether. I have suggested that these three trends have strong resem- blance to those which marked the break-up of the mediaeval world and which, in the Reniassance, replaced philosophy with literature, mysticism, and mathematics-pending the formation of a new cosmological framework within which philosophy could once more undertake its task of rational interpretation of a reality acknowledged by all as subject of inquiry. We too may be facing a philosophical interregnum analogous to that of the Renaissance period. There may well be abortive attempts to fill the metaphysical void, consequent on our age of analysis, with imaginative cosmological schemes analogous to those proposed by Fracastoro, Telesio, Paracelsus, or Campanella. And there may be new attempts to resuscitate speculative synthesis of the past, just as there were by the Neo-Aristotelians and Neo-Thomists of the sixteenth century. But these are fakes, because they do not provide a new conceptual frame adequate for taking up and utilizing the results of the analysis which destroyed the old one.

Should we then be despondent over the outlook for philosophy? Are the paths which we are pursuing blind alleys that lead to no fruition? I do not take this pessimistic view, even though it is im- possible for us to foresee what use may be found for the fruit of our labors in the philosophical world frame of the future. Meanwhile, if our "ordinary language" trend should evolve into a new renaissance of

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literary creativity, we can only rejoice. And if the ontological anxieties of our age of metaphysical scepticism can be relieved by the therapies of existentialism, why should we protest? Let us choose our own paths, tolerant of these divergencies. And let us not complain if our mathematical logicans operate on an abstract plane far removed from mun- dane concerns and human values-the hope for eventual discovery of the rational pattern for a new speculative system of the world, adequate to accommodate the human as well as the scientific perspectives of mankind, may well be in their hands.

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Article Contentsp.53p.54p.55p.56p.57p.58p.59p.60p.61p.62p.63p.64p.65p.66p.67

Issue Table of ContentsProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 37 (1963 - 1964), pp. 1-197Front Matter [pp.1-3]The Philosophical Interest in Existence [pp.5-24]Essences, Attributes, and Predicates [pp.25-51]The Age of Analysis [pp.53-67]Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 1963-64Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Officers [pp.69-73]Report of the Representative to the American Association for the Advancement of Science [pp.73-76]Report of the Delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies [pp.76-79]Reports of Committees [pp.79-90]Audit Report [pp.91-95]Eastern Division [pp.96-106]Western Division [pp.106-113]Pacific Division [pp.113-117]

Memorial MinutesAlbert E. Avey 1886-1963 [p.119]John Tull Baker 1904-1962 [pp.119-120]David Baumgardt 1890-1963 [pp.120-121]Dickinson Sergeant Miller 1868-1963 [pp.121-122]Frank E. Morris 1889-1963 [pp.122-123]Paul Schrecker 1889-1963 [pp.123-124]Alfred Schutz 1899-1959 [pp.124-125]Celestine James Sullivan, Jr. 1905-1964 [pp.125-126]Arthur M. Weinberg 1923-1964 [pp.126-127]Sidney Zink 1917-1963 [p.127]

List of Members [pp.128-197]Back Matter

Documents

Ernst a Moody-The Age of Analysis