An Australian philosopher, returning in 1960 to the centre of English philosophy after an absence of more than a decade, remarked on, and regretted, the change he found. He had left a revolutionary situation in which every new move was delightfully subversive and liberating. He returned to find that, though the subject appeared still to be confidently and energetically cultivated, the revolutionary ferment had quite subsided. Where there had been, it seemed movement in one to him, a general and triumphant direction, there were now a number of individuals and groups pursuing divergent interests and ends, often in a relatively traditional manner.
His picture was a little over-simplified; but not grossly so. There did develop, in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, a new method, a new idea, in English philosophy which captured the imaginations of many of those who entered the field for the first time or returned to it after six years of an enforced intellectual sterility. In a curious way it combined, this new idea, magnitude of claim with modesty of pretension. The results it promised were to be achieved not by the inspiration of genius but by the careful and cooperative labours of men of sense.
Yet the results themselves were to be great. Foreseeably near were the total dissolution of ancient problems and the final extinction both of the avowedly metaphysical doctrines whose end had too often been announced before and of that traditional empiricism which had opposed to them the name of natural science and the reality of a weak metaphysics of its own. This clearing of ancient rubbish was to be accompanied by the delivery of the authentic treasure: the revelation, that is, of a whole world of infinite subtlety and diversity with its own fine and complex structure, a world which had always lain about us to be observed as soon as we ceased straining our eyes towards imaginary grandeurs and simplicities.
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Looked at in this cool and even light, much of the philosophy of the immediate and remoter past did indeed seem to consist of huge, bizarre mistakes, fantastic muddles, over-simplifications of an unbelievable grossness and crudity. Traditional problems shrivelled, traditional theories crumbled and ‘linguistic’ philosophers, treading a sure path, could pick their way—if they were careful and thorough—through swamps of controversy in which their perhaps more powerful but certainly less enlightened predecessors had become hopelessly and ridiculously bogged.
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The devastations wrought by the method were such as to inspire a kind of awe as well as an intense satisfaction. They also inspired a kind of hope which was not, at the time, absurd. It was possible to speculate about how long it would take to ‘finish off traditional philosophy; and a lecturer could conclude his lectures on the moral philosophy of the sophisticated Hume by remarking: ‘Had Hume shown the same acumen in logic [i-e. epistemology] as he showed in morals. . . philosophy ... would have been over. . . sooner.’
Strawson, The Post-Linguistic Thaw
