As I look back, over a distance of twenty-nine years, at the discussion of postwar Oxford philosophy which appears here as Essay 10, I find myself not wholly dissatisfied. That essay received its only other airing at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in 1958; and though the points made in it were by no means fully or properly pursued, at least in some respects it seems to me that my nose was pointed in the right direction. The ambivalence about the relation between the kind of conceptual analysis which I was discussing and the prosecution of philosophy was not just the product of my hazy mind; it was discernible in the practice of some of the leading figures of the Oxford scene, particularly Austin himself. When in the late nineteen-forties the Playgroup was instituted, its official (even if perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek) rationale, as given by Austin, was that all of us were local philosophical hacks, spending our weekdays wrestling with the philosophical inabilities of our pupils, and that we deserved to be able to spend our Saturday mornings in restorative nophilosophical activi-ties, which would nonetheless be both enjoyable and possibly even, in the long run, philosophically beneficial. And so we started on such paraphilosophical topics as maps and diagrams and (in another term) rules of games. At this point, evidently, paraphilosophy was conceived of as not being philosophy, though in some ways akin to philosophy.

However, when some of us raised questions about this relationship and showed signs of impatience for a distinguishing criterion, we were met with a not uncharacteristic shift of position. When we asked for a distinction between what is important and what is not important (by which, of course, we meant a distinction between linguisticdata which are, and again which are not, philosophically important), we were liable to be met by the statement (also made at the end of Austin's paper Pretending) that he, Austin, was not very good at distinguishing between what is important and what is not. I now take this to have been a way of withdrawing, or at least weakening, his own earlier differentiation of philosophy from what I am calling

"paraphilosophy." And if the Master wobbles thus, what should we expect from his friends, or for that matter, from his enemies?

It seems to me that this issue should be faced and not fudged; and I intend to conclude my contribution with an endeavor to get the question or questions involved clear, even if shortage of time and intellectual equipment compel me to leave it, or them, unanswered. The

"enemies" of midcentury Oxford philosophy may be misguided, but at least they have a right to a rational, rather than a merely dismissive, response.

Type A Cases

Let us suppose that we are seriously interested in investigating the insubstantiation of a certain concept K within a certain range of material r. In such a case it would seem natural for us to look for a science or discipline which would offer us a system of ways of deter-mining, with respect to that range of material, the presence or absence of K. We might, however, be disappointed in more than one way. We might not be able to locate any discipline which even professed to be able to provide us with such a systematic method; or, though we could locate such a discipline, we might believe or suspect that the discipline was spurious and that it was no better qualified to cater to our needs than astrology would be to assure us of our complete safety during our next visit to Beirut. We might, however, be fortunate; we might be able to satisfy ourselves that the available discipline was authentic. In such a case, however, we might have to recognize that the discipline in question would be powerless to provide for our needs unless the propositions which we wished it to certify for us were first re-expressed in a pattern congenial to demonstration by that disci-pline; what we wish to know has to be re-expressed in a theory-relevant form; and the procedure for achieving this kind of "rational reconstruction" might vary according to the kind of theory which we need to call into play.

In a certain limited range of further cases, what we have just saidmight be insufficient to satisfy us. For we might want to take seriously, and so scientifically, not merely questions about whether K is realized in r (for which we need discipline ®,) but also questions about whether it is (in an appropriate way) incumbent on 0, to determine for us whether and when K is realized in r; and to settle these further questions, we may require a further theory e, which, when provided with suitable (®,-relevant) rational reconstructions of statements which (informally) saddle 0, with such obligations or incumbencies, will decide for us concerning their truth or falsehood. We thus have a prospect of an indefinite sequence of disciplines, each pronouncing upon the adequacy, in a certain respect, of its predecessor in the se-quence.

Type B Cases

In this range of examples, perhaps in order to avoid the real or supposed viciousness of such an unending sequence, this feature does not appear. In these cases, to be called type B cases, the adequacy of discipline D in a desired respect is certified by appeal not to a further discipline D but to discipline D itself, which is, in an appropriate sense, self-justifying. It might (for example) be possible to prove in discipline D a general thesis or law (0,), one particular instance or specification of which (@,,) would in effect assert the adequacy of D to prove its own adequacy in a desired respect; and, maybe, yet a further instance or specification of 0,,, namely ®,,, would be provable which in effect asserts the adequacy of D to prove the adequacy of D to prove the adequacy of D in the desired respect. We should thus, in a type B case, have substituted for the unending sequence of justifying disciplines typical of type A cases, each feeding on its predecessor, an unending sequence of laws or theorems within a single discipline; and the logical gain from this alteration might be appreciable.

Type B Cases and Philosophy

We should, finally, turn briefly to the impact of the preceding discussion on matters at issue between Oxonians and a certain group of their foes-foes who might accept as their battle cry the once famous slogan "Clarity is not enough." These foes will hold that one part of the business of philosophy is to decide about, even perhaps to enact, the competence and authority of philosophy to determine the answersto certain nonlinguistic questions about Reality. Some might even go so far as to say that philosophy is a supremely sovereign science, perhaps even the only supremely sovereign science, in that among sciences it alone has authority to determine its own competence in every area in which a demand for the justification of competence is legiti-mate. But whether one accepts a more or a less extreme version of this position, one will hold that the material characterization of the work of philosophy must be such as to allow for the fulfillment of this role, and that in either case it cannot be a full characterization of the work of philosophy to describe it as the achievement of conceptual clarity. Indeed, this activity may not even be a part of philosophy, though it will no doubt represent a capacity for which philosophers will have a need.

It is, I think, quite uncertain whether such demands on the part of anti-Oxonians are justified, or even whether they are coherent, but it is no part of my purpose here to decide upon the outcome of battles between Oxonians and their foes, only to make a little progress in deciding the location of the battleground or the battlegrounds, though I will confess to a hope that a knowledge of where the fighting is taking place might have a beneficial effect on the upshot of that fighting.

But perhaps someone will say: "You have not yet done enough to help us much, and so we are not yet ready to exhibit any trace of excitement. For it might be that there is no even faintly plausible candidate for a description of the material content of philosophizing which would give the anti-Oxonian any chance of making good his claim that the work of philosophy extends beyond conceptual clarification and reaches as far as self-vindication as a rational discipline.

So say more, lest the battle you locate turn out to be over before it begins."

At this point I reply: "If you insist on twisting my arm, I am not compelled to remain silent. For philosophy to achieve any end at all, or to fulfill any function, indeed for there to be such a thing as philos-ophy, there have to be (or to have been) philosophers. Just as the poet said that the proper study of mankind is Man, the anti-Oxonian can say that (in the first instance) the proper study of philosopher-kind is Philosophers. To be less cryptic, he will say that there will be a possibly not well-defined set of attributes or capacities, the possession of the totality of which (each in this or that degree) will fully determine the philosophical capability of the possessor. For example, everyonewill probably allow that this step will include reasoning-power, most would perhaps allow that it would contain a certain kind of theoretical imagination, but few would suppose it to contain a good diges-tion. For though a failure to reach a minimal digestive standard would probably terminate a philosophical career, once the minimum had been reached further digestive improvement would (probably) be irrelevant to philosophical merit, whereas reasoning-power is (prob-ably) not subject to this limitation. The anti-Oxonian, then, might suggest that the province of philosophy is the identification and vindication of that totality of capacities on which the varying degrees of philosophical capability ultimately rest. How good his prospects might be I would not presume to guess." H. P. Grice.