ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) Preface This book has several origins, widely separated in time and space. One of the first of these was the ambiguous reaction I had upon my initial encounter with analytic philosophy as an undergraduate in a prominent American philosophy department in the mid-1990s.

There, the projects of Quine and Davidson were still current, those of Carnap and Russell much less so, and phenomenology and “continental” philosophy widely dismissed and barely discussed at all. The pedagogy that communicated the current projects to me did a good job of expounding their details, but was less successful at showing their deeper programmatic motivations and larger philosophical significance.

It took me longer to see the currently favored projects themselves as arising from, and hence interpretable in terms of, a long and revealing history. This history, I realized later, connects the contemporary projects of analytic philosophy to what was once experienced as nothing short of a revolution in thought: the attempt to grasp in symbolic logic the very structure of the world, and so to make the terms of language speak into existence the clarity of a demystified life.

It was then, especially in reading Wittgenstein, that I realized that whatever “analytic philosophy” might today be said to be, its particular methods and styles could be understood as resulting from a radical and unprecedented opening of language to philosophical investigation and reflection. Discerning the effects of this opening in the history of the tradition might help as well, I reasoned, to determine what is really at issue in the question of its continuance into the future.

At the same time, I had taken up reading some of the texts of twentieth-century “continental” philosophy, particularly the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. The accusation of “unclarity” that analytic philosophers often direct against them did not convince me, and as I read further, I began to see the possibility of a much closer conversation than is now customary between analytic philosophy and these and other “continental” texts.