Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-hgkh8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T10:20:10.557Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Great Philosophy: Discovery, Invention and the Uses of Error

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

Christopher Norris
Affiliation:
University of Cardiff, Wales, UK
Get access

Summary

I

Jonathan Bennett reports J. L. Austin as having once remarked, apropos an idea of Leibniz, that ‘it is a very great mistake’, but that ‘only a very great philosopher could have made it’. One could pursue this comment in various directions, among them its bearing on Austin's work and what it tells us – when strategically placed upfront in his essay ‘Spinoza's Error’ – about Bennett's project of rational reconstruction as applied to sundry great philosophers in the Western canon. Austin, one can safely say, would not for one moment have extended to himself or his own philosophical practice the sort of generous licence for getting things wrong in a big, brave, intellectually ambitious and hence inherently error-prone way that he here extends to Leibniz. ‘Ordinary language’ philosophy as practised most influentially by Austin is, after all, a close-focused and meticulously disciplined enquiry into the manifold possible mistakes that result from our not taking adequate note of how language functions in everyday contexts of usage. Not for him the idea that there might be some honour – some special claim to greatness – in the readiness to risk falling into error or (conceivably) downright nonsense in pursuit of some grand but ultimately false or untenable thesis. Rather it is the business of philosophy to eschew such well-documented sources of large-scale systematic, speculative, or – as the charge sheet typically runs – ‘metaphysical’ error. Best stick to the kinds of common-sense though often highly nuanced and even revelatory wisdom enshrined in our everyday linguistic transactions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Philosophy Outside-In
A Critique of Academic Reason
, pp. 61 - 94
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×