ABSTRACT
Leslie’s love of cows really caught the author's attention, especially his love of Holsteins. Leslie’s encounter with ideas began long before the cows. His first book, following his doctorate from Birkbeck College, University of London, took its title from Hegel, The Rational and the Real. It was, in 93 pages, an account of “general conditions for all possible experience” which he argues are “general conditions for all possible existence”. Armour insists in The Rational and the Real that what role language plays in understanding is not a philosophical inquiry that can be pursued independently of questions about the nature of experience. Experience presumes reasoning, and reasoning that conjoins systems such as inductive claims, causal analysis and moral responsibility (a ground of social coherence) is grasped in linguistic models. A self emerges as an experiencing agent free to choose, think, act—in short, to determine from the knowable range of experiences which experiences will be its own.
