Collingwood’s criticism of analytic philosophy is essentially an accusation of ahistoricality and implicit dogmatism. Russell and Moore, who are Collingwood’s primary targets, had a theory of analysis that would clarify sentences by situating them in the context of all possible expressive power. This strategy is what I call single-commitment tracking. Collingwood argues that there is no way of providing a non-dogmatic account of the constitutive features of a single-commitment tracking account. Instead, Collingwood adopts multi-commitment tracking, in which an expressed commitment set has its constitutive features, which Collingwood calls “absolute presuppositions,” made explicit by an expressing commitment set. This achieves the clarity desired by analytic philosophy, but also introduces something which itself is uninterpreted. So, there is no explicatable context of all possible expressive power, and Collingwood has shown that it is only by engaging in this method of explicating absolute presuppositions, which he calls metaphysics, that new expressive power is unlocked.

The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.

In this chapter, I apply the criteria vetted in Chapter 2 to the non-attitudinal accounts of Russell and Crawford, the metacognitive accounts of Masny and Raleigh, Wagner’s endorsed-indecision account, and Friedman’s question-directed attitude account. I demonstrate that each account fails to satisfy one or more of the criteria for a satisfactory descriptive account of agnosticism.

In its original version, before Wittgenstein decided to extend the book’s scope, the Tractatus advanced a solipsism of a decidedly etiolated sort – so etiolated, indeed, that the self which according to this solipsism claims ownership of the world ends up stripped of any substantial content. By the time it was published, however, the solipsism passage had been revised so as to gesture towards a puzzling ‘metaphysical’ subject, whose importance seems to be primarily (though no doubt not exclusively) ethical. By the time he wrote the Blue Book Wittgenstein no longer held the unitary conception of language on which his Tractarian conception of solipsism depended, but he continued to deny coherence of a substantial self.

I look at Wittgenstein’s statement, in his letter to Russell, of the “main contention” of his book. I consider also the relation between his main contention and what he describes in the book as his fundamental idea. I discuss also what he means when he says that what he calls his main contention, and his main point is the cardinal problem of philosophy.

Some readers of the Tractatus claim that, for Wittgenstein, the correct philosophical method is “a method of logical analysis in terms of a symbolic logical notation, whereby the logical, syntactical or formal properties of logically unclear expressions are clarified by translating them into a logically perspicuous notation” (Kuusela 2019, p. 85). This chapter aims at refuting this view, maintaining that Wittgenstein distinguishes between logical analysis and philosophical clarification. More precisely, I would like to establish that, drawing on certain features of Russellian logical practice (as illustrated for instance in On Denoting), Wittgenstein makes a distinction between logically ordered language and completely analyzed language. For him, philosophical clarification does not consist in an analysis of ordinary language but in the visible manifestation (at the level of signs) of the logical ordering of its symbols.

In current analytic philosophy, Carnapian explication has become a prominent method and theme again, also under the names of conceptual engineering and mathematical philosophy. But there are questions about the reach and limits of this method, and in particular, about the goals for which it is appropriate. In the present essay, this topic is approached by reconsidering the origins of Carnapian explication, in the sense of its original inspirations and guiding paradigms.This leads to the following questions: What were the underlying goals in those cases, thus the function or functions explication was supposed to serve, and how did it serve them? Also, were those functions sufficiently stable and uniform to provide helpful orientation for us, both with respect to Carnap and current appeals to explication? Insofar as answers to those questions are not as easy as one might think, already because the relevant aspects often remain implicit, an important dimension of explication should be subjected to further clarification and critique. What is at issue here, at bottom, is the dividing line, insofar as there is one, between philosophical and scientific goals, and with it, between the methodologies appropriate for each.

The author looks at the part Cambridge played in the First and Second World Wars, and how war affected both Town and University in different ways. She describes Cambridge in 1914, with recruits lining up at the Corn Exchange, deserted lecture halls, and soldiers camping on Parker’s Piece. The town became site of a significant temporary military hospital built on a college cricket field, and it witnessed a constant flow of wounded soldiers from the front arriving on stretchers at Cambridge station. In 1939, Cambridge experienced the terror, bombs and blackouts of war all over again. The sound of aircraft overhead was ever-present as Cambridge was encircled by RAF airbases at Bourn, Bottisham and Fowlmere, and privately owned Marshalls Airport. Duxford’s key role as Sector Station in the Battle of Britain and home to the US Air Force is carefully explained. In the Cold War era of secrecy and espionage that followed, the names of the notorious Cambridge Five and location of the regional nuclear bunker in Cambridge are also revealed.

Pacifist activism flourished in Britain and America during the first half of the twentieth century, and peace was a central preoccupation for writers and intellectuals before and during both world wars. Vera Brittain, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, and Aldous Huxley were all actively engaged in some form of peace writing. This chapter examines this history in the British context, from the impact of conscription during the First World War to the grave challenges to peace of the 1930s. It investigates a variety of texts by conscientious objectors, peace campaigners, feminist pacifists, anti-war poets, public intellectuals, and internationalist reformers. This literary and political history reveals how the notion of peace shifted radically during this period. What began as a moral imperative – inherited from Christian teachings and the liberal legacy of the Enlightenment – was transformed into a secular notion with extensive political potential. As this chapter shows, pacifist thought underpinned arguments towards socio-political reform, and it shaped the language of rights central to political discourse after the Second World War.

This chapter explores the cultural preconditioning through which many visitors to the East viewed and processed events around them in the early twentieth century. It considers how the messaging and tone found in missionary treatments of Chinese society, which mirrored May Fourth writing in striking ways, added urgency to evangelical work by stressing its morally transformative purpose, something missionary writing shared with revolutionary agitation. On asserting the primacy of Western beneficence and valuation of life, missionaries were joined by more secular and celebrated writers, including Bertrand Russell, Somerset Maugham and Alexis Leger (aka St.-John Perse). In the broader logic of colonialism, the idea that benevolence was practiced or not, or suffering alleviated or not, became a key criterion with which cultures and peoples were categorised in the hierarchy of nations. Chinese writers during May Fourth in turn embraced and internalized such dichotomies in a form of sociological coproduction. In the paradigm to which many reformist writers subscribed, Chinese culture precluded the very idea of assisting strangers or of mitigating social ills in any meaningful way. Western power over the Chinese was thus attributed in part to civic cultures and day-to-day values lacking in Chinese communities.

This chapter presents the descriptivist theories at the roots of contemporary semantics, and the epistemic puzzles about meaning which had led Frege, Russell, and Carnap to endorse them.

Although the received view of Ernst Mach comported well with Mach’s historical influence on members of the Vienna Circle , it is inadequate, and it is now giving way to a more realistic and nuanced ‘neutral monist’ view. I defend the neutral monist tradition and show that it is actually a form of scientific realism, not positivism. I also argue that it is more in line with Mach’s contemporary reception, and that it leads to the views of American Realists, as well as to the views of our contemporary neutral monists. I start with a characterisation of some tenets of neutral monism in general, many of which were shared by William James and Bertrand Russell, both deeply influenced by Mach. I then detail the evidence for these views in Mach’s texts (including his notebooks and other documents). Seeing Mach as a kind of realist also casts much light on his scientific views and corrects a number of historical misconceptions regarding both atomism and Mach’s philosophy of space and time. Finally, I discuss Mach’s place in the neutral monist movement of James, Russell, and the American Realists, and the revival of these views in recent philosophy of mind.

This introduction shows why and how common sense matters to philosophy, thus lighting up the terrain that subsequent chapters explore in much greater detail. First, it explains briefly what common sense is, and next, what common-sense philosophy is. Then it considers whether, and if so, how, common sense should matter to philosophy; can we not do without common sense? Subsequently, it turns to criticisms of the idea that common sense matters to philosophy, and of the very idea of common-sense philosophy. It concludes with a short note on the organization of the book.

Woolf calls Hardy “the greatest tragic writer among English novelists,” and I argue that she shares his tragic sense. Both a “Dionysiac” view of time as unceasing flux (the view held by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Henri Bergson) and a mathematical view of time as abstract continuum (the view held by Bertrand Russell) make for tragedy in Woolf’s fiction. Her novels are devoid of the ritual and mythic consolations so often misattributed to ancient drama. Woolf’s Dionysiac time is severed from Dionysiac rituals’ cyclical renewals. Woolf’s mathematical time is severed from redemptive myth. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. Woolf depicts the nonteleological, nonanthropocentric change and persistence of nonhuman nature, as well as the inhuman permanence of Russell’s “universals.” To the Lighthouse and The Waves set the “still space” of characters’ most cherished moments against “the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars.” Woolf’s fiction accentuates time’s passing and models characters’ Sisyphean resistance to it.