[hist-analytic] Whither Analytic Philosophy?

[Jlsperanza at aol.com]

Lovely comments, R. B.!
 
Forays, _that_ gave me the wrong clue! How was I to know you meant  
'prescription'. Who am _I_ to prescribe? Just joking. I see that I wrote on  
post-analytic in this FORUM, "The analytic/post-analytic distinction". 
You are very right it all started with Socrates. Grice has a good one here, 
 when he compares, in our copies of WoW, Retrospective Epilogue, that is:
Oxonian dialectics and Athenian dialectics.
He wants to say that unlike the Athenian dialectics (Socrates, Plato,  
Aristotle), the Oxonian dialectics, with the exception of perhaps J. O. Urmson,  
who was into the Paradigm-Case Argument, they never really cared about this 
or  that truth _value_!
Grice was an entire man. Elsewhere I speak of the latitude and longitude of 
 Grice. He jokingly refers to Oxonian tutors as having to be good at two 
fronts:  the history of philosophy (the greats) and modern stuff published in 
modern  journals and stuff: for problems scan the centuries, Grice writes.
My very first publication, which I offered as a memorial to Grice, features 
 a collocation I cared to love from G. N. Leech. In his _principles of  
pragmatics_ he speaks of 'retrospects and prospects'. And it is this I am good  
that. I can talk of retrospects for ages. I'm less sure about prospects. A 
good  thing about them is that they _are_ open-ended. With the fashion of  
deconstructionism, and post-structuralism, I'm sure the same applies to  
_retrospects_ -- on a clear day! Later. JLS 
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