Abstract

Systematic philosophy has for a long time now been disavowed as an objective or even as an interest by many professional philosophers whose view of their subject regards it as an activity of analysis rather than of construction. That this disclaimer should have become so common at a time when, in other disciplines, the idea of system was coming more and more into prominence suggests that philosophers and other scholars may somehow have been talking at cross-purposes. The opposition of analytic and constructive modes comes out clearly in the pejorative use of expressions like “system-builders,” and a glance at the history of the analytic movement makes it clear that the kind of system it sets itself against is typified by the Hegelian system, the System before which Kierkegaard was on the point of kneeling down, flourishing his handkerchief so as not to get his trousers dirty, only to discover that its completion had been put off until the next Sunday.