ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi

how I see philosophy, philosophical argument and philosophical understanding,

it seems clear that my first acknowledgement should be the same now as twentyfive years ago, to my graduate supervisor John Wisdom. For I have to
acknowledge that, through what have seemed at the time quite radical shifts in
interest, method and belief, my thinking about philosophy and its history has
kept within a general view of the clash of theories and of the ordinary
intermingling of philosophical insight with error which has much in common
with Wisdoms. Some of my own arguments also now remind me, not only of
Wisdoms dissatisfaction with Wittgensteins tendency to view traditional
philosophy as mere illusion, but of his general opposition to what P.F.Strawson
has described as the reductive rage. This relationship may be evident, beneath
admittedly large differences of approach and style, both when occasional
reference is made to Wisdoms writings and elsewhere, as in the structure
employed in the two arguments which are central to Volume I and Volume II
respectively: the general explanations of the concepts of knowledge and of
substance. The form of those explanations occurred to me only relatively late in
the day, but the seed was surely sown, very many years ago, by John Wisdom. I
hope that the differences are not such that he would entirely disown the plant.
Also on the side of philosophy I must mention (without having any idea of
what he would think of the present work) Strawson himself, whose books did
much to persuade me that answers to the really important questions of
metaphysics are most likely to be found in an adequate reassessment of
traditional theory of substance. David Wiggins, despite our differences of view,
is another who has influenced my conception of these questions, and I am
grateful for his active and friendly interest and encouragement. A class given
with him and Michael Woods provided an essential opportunity to subject my
ideas on identity to expert and principled criticism without which they would
have been, I believe, less clear and less consistent. Like everybody else with
realist intuitions, I have learnt a lot from various writings of Saul Kripke and
Hilary Putnam. And, like everybody else, in my thinking about knowledge I owe
much to the discussion sparked off by the Gettier Problem (less only than to
traditional epistemology). Other specific debts are recorded in the text.
This is a work which is about philosophy through being a historical and critical
analysis of a particular philosophy constructed and argued at a particular time
and place. My debts are therefore no less deep to those historians of philosophy
who have influenced and encouraged my study of the seventeenth century. When
preparation for lectures on the Empiricists long ago made me dissatisfied with
the (as it seemed to me) grossly unhistorical approach to texts which was more
or less universal among analytic philosophers in the sixties, the first informed
encouragement I received was given with great vigour and generosity by Rom
Harr, perhaps the only member of the Oxford Sub-faculty of Philosophy at the
time who was qualified to give it. I sought him out after coming across his book
Matter and Method, and he soon had me reading Robert Boyle. He also
introduced me to John Yolton, who was by luck visiting Oxford. Johns