cover image The Nature and Future of Philosophy

The Nature and Future of Philosophy

Michael A. E. Dummett, . . Columbia Univ., $13 (152pp) ISBN 978-0-231-15052-1

A concise yet wide-ranging examination of the scope and limits of philosophy by one of the analytical tradition's most articulate and significant living figures. Dummett (The Origins of Analytical Philosophy ) defends a vision of philosophy as the analysis and clarification of our everyday concepts, thereby carving out a unique position for the discipline as distinct from scientific enquiry, psychology, and religion. He fleshes out this vision in broad strokes, rooting what he calls a notion of “philosophy as the grammar of thought” in Gottlob Frege's groundbreaking work in logic, in particular his analysis of sentences and his theory of meaning, based on the distinction between sense and reference. While the author does profess a desire for reconciliation between the analytical and continental schools of philosophy, his choice and consideration of Hans Georg Gadamer as representative of the continental approach to questions about language, to the exclusion of figures like Saussure, Ricoeur, and Derrida, is perplexing. Nonetheless, Dummett's passionate advocacy for philosophy's continuing relevance and his defense of the field against the encroaching tendencies of physics and neurological science are never less than compelling. (May)