I didn't start taking classes in philosophy until several quarters ago and had merely read out of interest for some years. It has always been a matter of some discomfort that people hold even THIS sort of knowledge at arm's length, fail to truly enter into it, mistake a kind of aimless and wandering detachment from the essential questions for objectivity, and fail to develop any understanding whatever of philosophy as a project.

I have no stake in this matter except an intellectual one. It's quite saddening for me to see yet another formal student of philosophy produce such a boring, typical, and downright naive treatise on the subject, a writer who has chosen to convert into assertions of half-truths a thinly veiled myopia.

If this is the sort of intellectual cynicism that the modern institution produces, then I am quite happy that I've had no part in it.

And why on earth is there no mention of the Americans? Is that once burdgeoning and scientifically literate pragmatist tradition completely lost to us? Why are we still dwelling on the befuddled analytic solution to continental problems when such great American minds as Charles Sanders Pierce have made such sharpening new developments without precociously discarding the old? And their writing is as far as anything out there from being mealy-mouthed or inexact.

I'm sorry, but we can do a hell of a lot better than this. And we ought to; our current level of science demands it.