If he had not been discouraged by the opposition of the farmers, Mein Herr could surely have done better still. He could have made his map into a relief map, with mountains and valleys represented on the scale of one foot to the foot; he could have represented every blade of grass and every pool of water, every pillar box and every fence, every mouse and every man, by a full-scale model in the appropriate and authentic materials. And all the models could have been working models, programmed to represent exactly every waterfall and every thunderstorm, every birth, marriage anddeath, every renaissance and every reformation. If he had done all this the country would not simply do nearly as well, but just as well as the map. He could throw the country away, and still have the country. He could throw the map away, and still have all that he needed, unless for some reason he wanted to have two copies of his map.

A Great deal of contemporary French philosophy is phenomenology. Phenomenology, roughly speaking, rejects the positivistic view of objective reality, and puts forward an ‘intentional’ reality, brought about tosome extent by our own purposes, individual and collective. Merleau-Ponty starts from the phenomenological position, and assigns to objective thinkingits origin and place within phenomenological thinking. My references will be almost exclusively to the Phenomenology of Perception, which is really a phenomenology of consciousness, starting from the problem of perception. Perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is one way of ‘being conscious’, which is not essentially different from any other way of being conscious.

Positivists have always objected to people talking about God.

Their objection rests on quite general logical grounds. They have discovered a simple, formal test by which to tell significant remarks from nonsensical collections of words. There must, they say, be some minimal conditions of intelligibility. From these we can construct a Principle of Meaning. Now religiousremarks, on any positivist Principle, are demonstrable nonsense.

What are these conditions of intelligibility ? Speaker and hearer, we suppose, must use the same language; must possess a rather similar background of information; must both have some interest or other in communication.… Such matters of ‘more and less’ will vary with the topic, the parties, and the occasion.

It should be well known that the philosophy of soren Kierkegaard exerted considerable inflence upon Ibsen the playwright, despite the latter's reluctance to admit as much. When Ibsen's play Brand was first published in Copenhagen, in 1866, it was hailed as a dramatic representation of Kierkegaar's philosophy, and subsequent critics have also indicated in a general way the Kierkegaardian concepts with which this play abounds. The earlier Love's comedy is also vibrant with Kierkegaardian undertones, and the fact that something of this same quality is echoed and re-echoed throughout the playwrite's entire corpus suggest something more than a merely literary influences: it indicates a temperamental affinity between the two authors.

One of the most characteristic (and certainly most original) claims of the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as the philosophy of ordinary language, is that traditional philosophical discourse has usually been logically improper because it has depended upon systematic misuses of certain expressions in ordinary language and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with the description of the actual use of language. To substantiate this claim, the philosopher of ordinary language has had to establish at least the following two general philosophical theses, which together seem to constitute the hard core of original doctrine in the philosophy of ordinary language. First, that the meaning of an expression is its use and not its referent or what it corresponds to. Second, that the description of the uses of certain expressions in language is not merely a study of words but genuinely solves the same problems which traditional philosophy had tried to solve through other methods.