On Discovering the Difference between Husserl and Frege

Abstract

Plato, Nietzsche and Emerson were the first writers in philosophy I read seriously, but G. E. Moore most attracted me once I undertook it as a discipline. His winnowing — not to say grinding — but nevertheless completely non-technical style seemed to me the correct one for philosophical work, and something like his view of “common sense” the only position that could justify philosophy as a humanly significant undertaking. His “Refutation of Idealism” — later supplemented by some of Gustav Bergmann’s papers — was especially significant for me. I thought, and still think, his fundamental argument there to be correct, and was convinced that it did “indeed follow that all the most striking results of philosophy — Sensationalism, Agnosticism and Idealism alike — have, for all that has hithertoo been urged in their favor, no more foundation than the supposition that a chimera lives on the moon.” (Philosophical Studies, p. 5) This seemed to me also to apply to the many variants of linguistic relativism found in post-Moorean philosophies: superficial modifications of the psychologisms, idealisms, agnosticisms and monisms of the 18 and 1900’s

Date of birth: September 4, 1935.

Place of birth: Buffalo, Missouri.

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1964.

Academic appointments: University of Wisconsin — Madison; University of California at Los Angeles; University of Colorado; University of Southern California.