Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1: The Dawn of Analysis

Abstract

The jacket of this first volume of the two volume work tells us that this is a history of analytic philosophy from 1900 to mid-century. Accordingly, we can properly evaluate it under three heads: (1) the care and accuracy of the scholarship; (2) the light it throws on the relationships among the various activities it describes; and (3) the quality of the philosophical argumentation. Evaluated under the third, the book deserves high praise. It provides serious philosophy: arguments are carefully set out and taken to pieces, objections and possible responses are developed in an orderly way. Most readers will learn something of philosophical value, and even on the issues about which they disagree with Soames, they will find him a worthy and helpful opponent. In this respect the text provides a model to which students should aspire. Every page demonstrates one way in which philosophy can be done excellently, as will be no surprise to those familiar with Soames's other work. Evaluated under the other two heads, however, the book in my judgement falls short. Not only are there historical inaccuracies, the approach to reading, evaluating and interpreting texts is one I find uncongenial; and the attempt to impose some kind of overall developmental themes on the material under discussion strikes me as unsuccessful. Soames's attitude to the task of interpreting texts is stated on the first page: "the philosophy done in this period is still close enough to speak to us in terms we can understand without a great deal of interpretation" (xi). If time alone obscures, the contemporaries of Aristotle or Kant should have faced negligible interpretative problems. Soames almost never evinces any interpretive doubts1, nor does he mention that there is a huge body of conflicting interpretive work relating to the