ABSTRACT
Contemporary philosophical writing is largely impersonal and technical in style. It proposes definitions, makes arguments, criticizes other arguments, corrects previous infelicities and imprecisions in a position, and situates it all in a context of issues current in the discipline. The canons of style are less rigid than those used in the natural sciences, and they avoid the historian’s phobic avoidance of the first person singular, but they are, nevertheless, unmistakably academic and ‘‘professional.’’ This writing seems, on the whole, well suited to the subjects discussed by the philosophers in current practice, and to the aims they hope to achieve by that writing. Much of the work of their intellectual predecessors also seems suited to the style of the technical treatise, and, indeed, much was written in some variant of that form. However, anyone who has considered the history of the discipline knows that there is a proliferation of other forms and styles to be found even among the canonical classics of the field.
