In our essay, “On What There Is”, we confessed ourselves unequal to the
task of addressing the question of Being, bare. Compare further:
You asked me the use of criticism. You might just as well have asked me the use of thought.
-- Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891)
Bizarrely, though the question was meant satirically, that
very phrase occurs as a chapter-title in a book written by the philosopher and
historian Ernest Gellner in all
seriousness: “The Uses of Thought”.
The succeeding chapter-titles are equally grandiose: “The Uses of Doubt”, and “The Stuff of
Change”. This occur in his volume
from 1964, the even grander Thought and Change. Yet this is odd, since Gellner’s
general thrust is deflationary.
Cf. also the classic Heideggerian title, Was heisst denken?,
to which we have often had occasion to allude.
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