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Articles

Philosophers in Workaday Form

J.L.H. Thomas reports from Reading on the 1992 Joint Session.

For the first time in its seventy-four years’ history, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association at Reading in July this year was held during the week rather than over the weekend. Whether this change, momentous by philosophical standards, reflected philosophers’ conviction that philosophy is too serious a business nowadays to be practised at the weekend, or rather their reluctance to sacrifice hard-earned leisure hours, or some other, more mundane consideration, was not apparent; and in any case it made very little difference. The format of the conference remained unchanged, the numbers attending, about two hundred, were the same, and if the overall standard of the papers contributed was perhaps rather higher than last year, these no doubt had been prepared long beforehand in their authors’ usual hours of work, whatever they may be.

In his inaugural address on the Tuesday evening on ‘The Cartesian Legacy’, Professor John Cottingham of the University of Reading had set himself two closely related tasks: on the one hand, to reaffirm the permanent importance to philosophical thought of the ideas of Descartes; on the other, to correct certain misconceptions of these same ideas on the part of philosophers. Although Descartes’ Meditations remain the most popular text for students beginning philosophy, the trend of English-speaking philosophy over the last fifty years or so has been strongly anti- Cartesian, and in particular the conception of the mind as essentially private has been widely rejected.

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