Mind under the Editorship of David Hamlyn

Abstract

As the centenary of the great philosophical journal Mind draws near, I am contributing an appraisal of the work published in it under the editorship of my friend David Hamlyn.' Others, whose contributions I have not seen, will deal with its orientation and content under the editorships of Croom Robertson, G. F. Stout, G. E. Moore and Gilbert Ryle. My task is considerably more difficult than theirs, since these previous editorships spanned long periods, and published work readily assessable in virtue of its distance, whereas the editorship of Hamlyn is only beginning, and may, at this uncertain juncture in the history of philosophy, take quite different directions. There is in addition the question as to the policy of refusals under a given editorship. In the time of Moore nearly everyone received astonishingly phrased refusals which honoured one by his detailed interest in one's errors: in the time of Ryle, too, one had refusals, terser in phrase and with references to 'queues' and possibilities of 'boiling down', which bore witness to his impartiality. But in the case of Hamlyn the pattern of his refusals lies in the future, and there are not as yet even legends about it. The situation, however, presents no difficulties since, knowing David Hamlyn, I am sure that I should have thought most of the articles that he rejected inferior to those he accepted, and for much the same reasons as he did. He made, I feel sure, the best possible selection among the articles submitted to Mind during the three years of his editorship. My task now becomes the difficult one of passing judgement on some of the best recent thinking in Britain and America, in so far as this was more or less 'analytic' in orientation, and found expression in short papers rather than in full-length treatises such as those reviewed in these issues, e.g. Prior's Objects of Thought, Rawls's A Theory of Justice and Strawson's The Bounds of Sense. My difficulty now is that I have come by stages, in my long stay among non-analytic Americans, to be more and more out of sympathy with contemporary analytic thought, so that what I say