Introduction

Some people like to think that the modern discipline of philosophy has little if anything to learn from the history of the subject, but in reality the philosophical inquiries of each generation always take shape against the background of an implicit dialogue with the actual or imagined ideas of past thinkers. Many of our current debates on the relationship between thought and language bear the imprint of what the ‘father of modern philosophy’ said, or is supposed to have said.

A basic presupposition of the ‘Cartesian’ metaphysical framework as normally interpreted is the idea of thought as something inner, hidden, private. We start, each of us, from the inside, from our own internal reflections and cogitations, and then by a problematic and circuitous route move outwards, to the public world of communication. The validity of the private perspective of the Cartesian meditator has had a curious dual fate in the twentieth century: the majority of philosophers (from Ryle and Wittgenstein onwards) have found it, in one way or another, deeply suspect; but in our non-philosophical culture it still strikes a responsive chord. Most people, unversed in philosophy, would probably respond favourably to the words of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land: ‘we think of the key, each in his prison’. Words, on this picture, are attempts to clothe the true inner core of thinking, private to each of us.