“Words, from the
earliest times of which we have historical records, have been objects of
superstitious awe. The man who knew his
enemy’s name could, by means of it, acquire magic powers over him… This view
underlies the philosophies of Plato and Carnap and of most of the intermediate
metaphysicians.” (p. 23)
“Thus the
difference between a statement which is disjunctive and one which is not does
not consist in any difference in the state of affairs which would make it true,
but solely in the question whether the difference between the possibilities which
our statement leaves open is interesting to us or not.” (p. 87)
These two
passages from Bertrand Russell’s An
Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth serve as a handy summary of what I love and
hate about philosophy. On one hand,
there is the magic power that deep thinking brings when we examine what we are
actually saying. On the other, there is
the suspicion that, in the end, we are just playing games with words that are
more or less interesting.
Somewhere in the
middle, there are some useful things. Philosophical prose is kind of like the barre
exercises of writing, useful for training and sometimes beautiful, but
ultimately there to underpin (we hope) something beautiful later. Parsing out the sentences and following the
laborious chains of reasoning are good for the brain, but not precisely fun.
Those of us
interested in how brains work and one possible way that language captures
experience may find this book an interesting project. If not, there are many other places to
explore.
