I had a friend in graduate school who had come to the United States from England to pursue his Ph.D. in Philosophy. This was the 1960s, and he was much more enamored than I was with the “Ordinary Language Philosophy” that drew heavily on Wittgenstein’s approach. He was fond of quoting one of his Cambridge mentors, Professor John Wisdom, whom he reported as having said in a lecture that “all philosophical claims are either true and trivial or false and illuminating.”
That claim itself strikes me as both false and trivial. And I can think of many philosophical claims that are both true and illuminating. But—for reasons that are likely very different than what motivated my friend and his mentor—I do find the category of “false and illuminating” to be intriguing.
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