Preface to updated edition of Must We Mean What We Say?

Summary

Friends have repeatedly remarked to me that some later preoccupation of mine can be found foreshadowed in passages of Must We Mean What We Say? This quality of previewing might be understood merely as a consequence of the book's history, that although it is my first book, and although its title essay was written in 1957, it collects work from the ensuing dozen years and was not published until I was into my fourth decade, when my interests may be thought to have been fairly developed. But I understand the presence of notable, surprising anticipations to suggest something more specific about the way, or space within which, I work, which I can put negatively as occurring within the knowledge that I never get things right, or let's rather say, see them through, the first time, causing my efforts perpetually to leave things so that they can be, and ask to be, returned to. Put positively, it is the knowledge that philosophical ideas reveal their good only in stages, and it is not clear whether a later stage will seem to be going forward or turning around or stopping, learning to find oneself at a loss.

I received my first copy of the book from its publisher on the day of what I recall as the most tortured of the emergency faculty meetings following the massive arrest of students occupying the main administration building of Harvard College, in April of 1969, so that my initial joy, or its expression, in perceiving the book's existence in the world, was largely put aside, whether as a relief from isolation or as a source of refuge it was hard to tell. But each of the ten essays making up the book has its own history, as does its Foreword, and a way of introducing this new edition of them is to give a little of the history in each case.