To excel as a contemporary academic philosopher is a matter of the quality of one’s analytic and argumentative skills, especially in their negative use to expose failures in the distinction-making of others
I was already fifty-five years old when I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian. But I had first encountered Thomism thirty-eight years earlier, as an undergraduate, not in the form of moral philosophy, but in that of a critique of English culture developed by members of the Dominican order. Yet, although impressed by that critique, I hesitated, for those Dominicans made me aware of the philosophical presuppositions of their critique, of a set of Thomistic judgments about the relationships between body, mind, and soul, about passions, will, and intellect, about virtues and reason-informed human actions. And those theses I found problematic. Why so?
From 1945 to 1949 I was an undergraduate student in classics at what was then Queen Mary College in the University of London, reading Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle with my teachers, while also, from 1947 onwards, occasionally attending lectures given by A. J. Ayer or Karl Popper, or by visiting speakers to Ayer’s seminar at University College, such as John Wisdom. Early on I had read Language, Truth and Logic, and Ayer’s student James Thomson introduced me to the Tractatus and to Tarski’s work on truth. Ayer and his students were exemplary in their clarity and rigor and in the philosophical excitement that their debates generated. And I became convinced that the test of any set of philosophical theses, including those defended by Thomists, was whether it could be vindicated. In and through such debates. Yet I also had to learn—and this took a little longer—that in the debates of academic philosophy in the twentieth century no set of theses is ever decisively vindicated. To excel as a contemporary academic philosopher is a matter of the quality of one’s analytic and argumentative skills, especially in their negative use to expose failures in the distinction-making of others or gaps in their arguments, together with an ability to summon up telling counter-examples. Conceptual inventiveness is also valued
After the truth-shower 