Abstract

Three of the eleven essays are about Descartes, two about Moore, and the rest concern, variously, naturalism, the expression theory of art, ordinary language philosophy, and certain attitudes toward time. Bouwsma claims to have "tried to learn" the art of doing philosophy from the later Wittgenstein and it is not surprising that what he says about the work of the latter makes his own essays more understandable. Thus, his essays are investigations of phrases from someone else's work or of phrases which are typical of the language of certain philosophical theories. He is particularly concerned with phrases which, in his eyes, embody some grammatical confusion as the result of some misleading linguistic analogy. In such cases he is concerned with "quickening the sense of the queer," heightening the reader's awareness of the "scarcely perceptible deviation from sense" inherent in the way a certain philosophical question is posed, and with presenting "the meaning of those expressions which are involved in the particular case, and especially those which are relevant to exhibiting not the queerness but the sources, the roots of it". All of these essays are filled with puns, examples, and little stories. Where the latter preponderate the essays read most like traditional philosophy, and are easier to appreciate than the essays in which Bouwsma is content with "teasing the passage [and the reader] with analogies of sense."—T. C.