From its earliest beginnings and through much of its history, the
philosophical enterprise has rooted its intellectual procedures in
common sense. Ordinary discourse is what the pre-Socratic thinkers
did at the dawn of speculation. The same approach was
characteristic of the medieval mystics, Pascal in the seventeenth
century, and Gaston Bachelard in the twentieth century. However
with the ascendency of the physical sciences, mathematics, and
depth psychology as influences in contemporary thought,
philosophical language and forms of expression became increasingly
distant from ordinary language. This created estrangement and
confusion in the learner's mind. In Return to Philosophy Thomas
Molnar diagnoses the verbal derailment of philosophy and shows how
it might be reconnected to the realities of human life. While
granting that philosophy must use a somewhat specialized language,
Molnar attacks jargon-laden thought by tracing certain root
assumptions that go deeper than the issue of language itself. He
locates these assumptions in the work of philosophers who,
espousing modernity, no longer trust the "reality of the real," and
are convinced that the world and our perception of it are elusive,
offering no foundation except in the human mind which, however, is
also the result of a "social contract," a temporary consensus or
transient network of meanings readily discardable. According to
changing ideologies and social structures we use "signs"
linguistic, psychological, hermeneutical, structuralist,
existentialist not to express reality but to establish
communication with others. Philosophy, then, shifts from the task
of knowing reality to the task of communicating here and now.
Return to Philosophy is a unique endeavor. Molnar's book unmasks
the modern derailment and shows that many leading philosophers do
not so much philosophize, but merely elaborate verbal-technical
instruments in what may be little more than trivial language games.
This volume will be of interest to philosophers, cultural
historians, and sociologists.
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