I’ve one more chapter of Berto’s Gödel book to comment on here, which I’ll do very shortly, and I mean to get back to the rest of Franks’s The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge (I got rather stuck on Franks’s tussle with Herbrand: I think I’ll just have to skip over that — but watch this space).
Meanwhile I’ve started dipping into Conceptions of Philosophy, a newly published collection of lectures given to the Royal Institute of Philosophy on the nature of philosophy.
Most of the contributors are my generation or older. Is that because reflecting on what we’ve been idling our time away with, hopefully finding something positive to be said for it, is a game for us old lags? Maybe. But I have to report that, so far, I don’t recognize very many of my own concerns in these contributors’ descriptions of what they think philosophers are/should be up to. Perhaps that’s because — though I’ve comfortably enough spent my time tucked away in philosophy departments — I’m not really philosophically minded. Well, I’m not if philosophy involves e.g. arm-waving blether about the True and the Good (David Cooper) or ignorant balderdash about the nature of mathematics (Peter Hacker).
Actually, it seems here that age tends to bring not wisdom but bollocks.