Abstract

According to the editors of this book, “The history of philosophy as taught today is a highly selective activity. In its determination to tell a particular story, it passes over in silence large swathes of otherwise interesting philosophical work”. This claim would have been worthy of serious consideration had it been made a few decades ago—that is to say, at a time when analytic philosophy was a clearly recognizable philosophical movement. The “particular story” according to which the works of the British idealists were allegedly sacrificed would then have been easily identified as the story of how the young Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore showed the absurdity involved in holding that...