ABSTRACT
One way to take Mr. Lazerowitz’s entertaining theory about philosophical theories, perhaps the most natural and genial way, is to suppose it intended to be only entertaining, a parody of the excesses of verbalistic positivism and amateur psychoanalysis. Philosophically more important than any of the foregoing, and underpinning it all, including what Bruner calls “generous addiction to the fallacy of the dramatic instance,” is a peculiarity of the whole conceptual fabric of psychoanalysis. Since mathematicians and physiologists must have kas as well as philosophers, it would be gullible in us to accept uncritically that only the latter’s kas play tricks on them. The psychoanalytic explanation either of behavior or of consciousness by impulses, repressions, traumas, complexes, compulsions, ids, libidos, and “the play of mental forces,” rather than by imaginable neural or spiritual realities, is like the apocryphal Scholastic’s explanation of a clock’s behavior by an essence of horadicity rather than by wheels and springs.
