Replies

All of here might appreciate a book, A Critique of Pure Verbiage by R. Englefield. I found this wee blurbie on a net search a minute ago:

Then the joy of unpacking a half-forgotten, neglected, English philosopher:

Critique of Pure Verbiage -- Essays on Abuses of Language in Literary, Religious, and Philosophical Writings

by Ronald Englefield, Ed. G. A. Wells & D. R. Oppenheimer, Open Court Publishing, 1990

I mean the title alone! And for the life of me I can't recall how and when I acquired this wondrous book

Ronald (1891-1975) will rise rise again, I swear.

He entirely screws, oops, disputes all those humorless Krauts (Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and that crowd) with good old Brit, Humean and Russellian commonsense. Well, he's not just knee-jerk anti-German, although he physically fought (mentioned in Dispatch) the Hun from the WW1 trenches in France. He survived this horror, and went on to teach French and German at various schools from 1920 to 1952, never gaining his due recognitions.

He sees much merit in Leibniz and even more in Goethe, and occasionally knocks Ruskin, Ryle, Ayer, even Whitehead!

In his essay on Things, Ideas, And Words we read

"Unfortunately there are certain regions of thought where the most abstract ideas are the principal topic and where in consequence there is no simple imaginative substitute for words. The concrete foundation of a highly abstract idea is apt to be so vast that there is no room for it in the mind of the philosopher, whatever species of symbolic representation he may employ. But just where the idea expands beyond the speculative mind 'Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein'"

["That is just where a word puts in a timely appearance." Goethe's Faust, part 1, line 1996]

He's good on apparent NL paradoxes:

Of the liar who lost her dentures, Englefield posits:

"She speaks without truth and teeth."