Essay: What (If Anything) to Expect from Today's Philosophers

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Some analytic philosophers are even daring to "do metaphysics" again. P. F. Strawson, one of the most respected of Oxford's analytic philosophers, boldly subtitled his latest book, Individuals, An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. The book is partly concerned with the difference between material objects and human beings, a highly technical question that, by extension, has to do with the very real problem of whether man can be explained like a flesh-and-blood object of whether he is an organism with a purpose. Another, younger Oxonian, Anthony Quinton, is completing a philosophical treatise, grandly titled The Nature of Things, that starts from the problem of identity and reference: Is a given object simply a bundle of qualities, or is it something more than that? Quinton points out that the question is as old as Aristotle, who grappled with the meaning of "substance." Strawson, as well as such U.S. figures as Harvard's Morton White, emphasizes that analytic technique is a means rather than an end.

The early analytic thinkers believed that with the clarifying of language the old questions of philosophy would simply disappear, but their intellectual offsprings are wiser. "Once you see that language permeates the world," says Morris Kaplan, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, "all the problems you had with the world come back." Strawson agrees that "the insatiable appetite of philosphers for generality has reasserted itself." In,other words, the philosophers are beginning to re-invent philosophy.

In Britain, philosophers are newly concerned over such ancient issues as the relationship of body to mind and the problem of causation in human behavior. David Wiggins of Oxford is currently exploring "the entire concept of event identity—what makes it right to say that event A is the same as event B?" An American illustrates Wiggins' problem with a homely example: "Is my act of flipping on the light switch the same act as my act of alerting the prowler, if in fact by flipping on the switch and illuminating the room, I do alert the prowler?" Although the question sounds as relevant as the medieval puzzler about how many angels can dance on a pinhead, Wiggins notes that it has highly practical implications in fixing intention and responsibility, and theoretical ones in helping to solve the age-old puzzler of free will v. determinism. Free will is back in philosophical style, and Wiggins concedes that the traditional way of stating that problem "wasn't after all in quite such a mess as had recently been supposed."

Time to Wake Up