Abstract

CCP is not, generally speaking, well-respected today. This is not so much because CCP is impure, being, as it is, all mixed up with dogmatic statements drawn from Scripture, Church teachings, and so on, but because CCP is impure in a certain way. All philosophies are always and everywhere impure in the sense of always and everywhere being embedded in some particular time and culture. Philosophies are written by philosophers, each of whom is taught many things at his mother’s knee long before he ever becomes a philosopher. What he is taught, though, will vary, and some doctrines, it would seem, are more damaging than others to what today is considered good philosophizing. My purpose in this paper is to set out the obnoxious form of impurity which is generally thought to invalidate CCP, and then briefly to provide some hints as to why the situation is not at all as bad as the critics make it out to be.