(2 of 6)
Before such chilling views took hold, philosophers always were men who thought, says Yale's Professor Emeritus Brand Blanshard, that "they could sit down in their studies and arrive by reasoning at a knowledge of the ultimate nature of the world." Perhaps in no other age had philosophers greater confidence in their capacity to do this than in the 19th century. Hegel tried to encompass all aspects of life within his dialectical logic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in 18 ponderous tomes. His idealistic principle that the material world exists only in relation to the Absolute mind led to the metaphysics of F. H. Bradley, who denied—even during the course of an hour's conversation in an Oxford chamber—that time or space had objective reality.
By the turn of the century, science and common sense alike dictated a shift away from idealism. "Damn the Absolute," roared William James, and the American pragmatists turned from principles and categories to results and facts. But the most effective rebellion against Hegelianism was carried out by two groups—the analytic philosophers, who prevail in U.S. and British universities, and the partisans of phenomenology and existentialism, who predominate in Western Europe. On some U.S. campuses, they are known as "the logicians and the lotus-eaters."
The analytic revolt began with two convictions: first, that experience contradicted the idealistic theory that material objects are not in themselves "real"; second, that philosophy could not compete with science as a way of studying the real world and thus would have to turn to other tasks. The analytic thinkers decided that philosophy's true job was to answer that old Socratic question "What does it mean?"
The study of meaning takes many forms. One stems from G. E. Moore of Cambridge, who argued that the business of philosophy was simply the analysis and clarification of common sense beliefs. Moore's colleague Bertrand Russell tried to eliminate fallacies by using an artificial language of symbols into which the truths of science and ordinary descriptive statements could be translated in order to test their accuracy. The "Vienna Circle" of logical positivists—who carried their ideas to Britain and the U.S. in the 1930s-declared that the criterion of meaning was verifiability; if the meaning of a statement could not be verified by empirical procedures, it was literally nonsense. But, as Russell pointed out, this criterion was itself a philosophical principle.
Finally Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-born Cambridge don, and such Oxonians as J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle decided independently that philosophy was concerned not so much with meaning as with use, and should seek to establish the rules of the various "language games" that men played with ordinary words, describing when a word was used legitimately, and when it was not. About all the various analytic schools had in common was the beliefs that philosophy has nothing to say about the world and that clarity and straight thinking will dissolve most of the classical metaphysical problems.
The Rise of the Lotus-Eaters