Philosophical Papers, 2 Vols.

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue"When a man tells me that he is neither of the Right nor of the Left," wrote the French political commentator, Alain, "then I know that I am talking to a man of the Right." It is easy to feel this way about analytical philosophy. Was there ever a philosophical tradition with a less articulated account of its own historical distinctiveness?Recently, however, there have been a number of attempts to throw the background assumptions of analytical philosophy into relief by examining it from a historical perspective. One thinks, in particular, of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty, as well as Charles Taylor, whose Philosophical Papers are here under review. What these undertakings have in common is that they aim to pass from the level of particular arguments to a historical standpoint from which the arguments can themselves be displayed as embodying assumptions and preconceptions taken over unreflectively from the wider culture. All three authors would agree with Hegel's view of philosophy as "its own time captured in thought." In each case, a certain central area of philosophy, it is claimed, is so far penetrated by the prejudices of a scientific culture as to undermine the value of the entire enterprise.What, though, is the status of such criticism? Is it that philosophical arguments are assessed and shown to be inadequate in their own terms and according to their own standards? If so, then the point of moving beyond the terrain of philosophical dispute as conventionally understood is not to inquire whether the beliefs in question are true, but to ask a further, distinct question: why, given that such beliefs are not true, do people nevertheless continue to hold them? From this point of view, the historical approach does not represent a challenge to the received conception of philosophical method, but amounts to the conjunction of two separate enterprises: philosophy and (for want of a better word) the sociology of knowledge.On a more radical view, however, the two aspects cannot be separated: a strict division between questions concerning the origins and motives of beliefs, on the one hand, and questions regarding their validity, on the other, is itself part of the Enlightenment tradition which is being called into question. Historical considerations may themselves form part of the argument as to whether to hold a partic-0022-352X/89/8605/270-276 (C 1989 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue