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Heidegger and his type of"deeply signficiant nonsense," was abiding. Yet
with his recognition of the hubris of logical positivism and his reversal of
direction, Ayer provides philosophers at the
fin de sihle
with no options
other than to be failed pontificators or failed journeymen.
Quine has been recognized throughout his career as a master jour–
neyman in logic and in many ways a magician of the philosophy of lan–
guage. On his own theory, philosophy is not primarily a progressive sci–
ence since it cannot claim to be "successful in predicting subsequent sen–
sory input." Yet to the degree to which it is linked with the sciences and
with mathematics and logic, philosophy has a part in a progressive cog–
nitive enterprise. In any event, many critical and scholarly activities,
which lack a predictionist criterion, have shown, within set frames of ref–
erence and agreed standards, the capacity to achieve intellectual progress
or convergence among their connoisseurs.
Yet this vision of philosophy is limited to a community with mastery
of the techniques of modern logic and the sciences. Unlike the original
logical positivists who argued that cognitive statements about moral or
political problems could not be made, the philosophers of science would
recognize the legitimacy of these human problems but would not have a
particularly strong base from which to say much about them, other than
the common sense shared, more or less, by the citizens.
Popper, who continues to believe in the importance of the philoso–
phy of science for "academic philosophy," expresses in
In Search of a
Better World
his concern for a philosophy which will confront the
problems of mankind. The early Circle, including Waismann, Schlick,
and Wittgenstein, was committed by its philosophical position, in
Popper's account, to the "prophecy". that philosophy would wither
away as its own methods of language analysis would show the traditional
philosophical problems to be "meaningless" or "pseudo-problems."
Popper's examples of ongoing philosophical problems are not reassuring.
The role of philosophical thought as distinct from common sense in
clarifying moral and political questions is not probed, and no evidence of
philosophical competence in achieving true judgments about them is
provided.
The actual history of the academy of the past three decades shows
that the end of logical positivism marked not the closing down of
professional philosophy but an opening of an academic theater of ideas.
The revitalized study of Nietzsche and the revision or resurrection of
Marx, or the hybrid Nietzschean Marxism; the revival of Heidegger, or
the transformation of the French Heidegger from Sartre through
Foucault and Derrida, are examples of the counter-response to the
