7 - “Someone willing to die for truth”: Peter Winch's legacy

Summary

In this closing chapter I wish to do three things. First, I wish to say something about the bearing of Winch's work on a certain conception of philosophy, a conception that attempts to blur the line between philosophy and the natural sciences. Second, I wish to ask what light might be thrown by an understanding of Winch's views on the currently vigorous debate between realists and antirealists. Third, I wish to ask one last time about the validity of the whole approach to philosophy that Winch inherited from Wittgenstein.

Philosophy and science

In his history of the decline and fall of the influence of Wittgenstein, Peter Hacker (1996) charts the waning appeal of the kind of conceptions central to the work of that philosopher. The tone of philosophy has, indeed, undoubtedly changed in that, as Hacker points out, many have become far less sceptical of the claim that discoveries in science can solve philosophical problems than Wittgenstein or Winch would be. Various advances in science have seemed to offer ways out of philosophical impasses, the long-standing failure to resolve which, as Kant remarked, bring scandal on philosophy. One example is the quite extraordinary discoveries about the mechanisms of the brain, and the ways in which variations in those mechanisms affect behaviour. That, it is thought, might help resolve the problems about mind and body, personal identity, consciousness and the like that have long plagued the philosophy of mind. Perhaps, after all, the advances show that mind and brain are identical.