Greg’s Reviews > Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English > Status Update

Philosophy as [Wittgenstein] saw it was ‘not a theory’, but the practice of clarifying thoughts that are otherwise ‘opaque and blurred’.

Each volume…gave solidity to the idea that the world was on the point of abandoning piety, gullibility and moralistic repression, in favour of secularism, science and personal freedom…
Ogden shared Richards’s hopes for the liberation of art through the triumph of science, believing that if readers could stop reading poetry for its meaning they would be able to focus on its effects on their ears, eyes and emotions.

Wittgenstein spent five years as a soldier, and never regretted it. (‘It saved my life,’ he said: ‘I don’t know what I would have done without it.’) From the beginning he believed that living ‘face to face with death’ gave him ‘an opportunity to be a decent human being’, and he learned to endure hardship and danger, and value the friendship of his working-class comrades.

‘Democracy is a kind of religion,’ as [William] James put it, and it will fail if we do not believe in it. Philosophy would never be more than a ‘small force’ compared with habit, self-interest and passion – but ‘a small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate effects more considerable than those of much greater forces if these work inconsistently.’

[William James] was, it seems, not a ‘child of the sunshine, at whose birth fairies made their gifts’, but a ‘neurotic subject’, susceptible to ‘one of the saddest feelings one can bear with him through this vale of tears’, namely the ‘consciousness of inward hollowness that accrues from seeing the better only to do worse.’

If you consider Spinoza in isolation, for instance, you will admire him as a self-effacing genius; but if you look at him historically you will see that he was destined to fail…History shows, in short, that every school of philosophy starts from a notion of the mind as a ‘mirror’, and ends by coming to grief.

By [Bentham’s] fourth birthday he was reading English and Latin, and at the age of twelve he started at Oxford University, studying there for six years before moving to London and qualifying for the bar in 1769, at the age of twenty-one. But then he brought his career to a halt, declaring that he could not practise law until it had been purged of its absurdities.

[Hume] came to think that no belief is so robust that it can withstand all doubt, and nothing is more unreasonable than confidence in the power of reason. The mind, it seems, is beset by so many contradictions that if it tries to take stock it ‘entirely subverts itself’ ending with ‘no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all.’

Many philosophers...believed in innateness, but none...supposed that innate ideas are immediately present to the untrained mind: they regarded them as a kind of buried treasure which will never be discovered without some intellectual effort. Locke’s rejection of innate ideas...would assume that the mind of a new-born child is an ‘empty Cabinet’, and then work out how different kinds of ideas find their way inside.