ABSTRACT
J. L. Austin once remarked that philosophers tend to succumb to the temptation of oversimplification. In their search for rounded, coherent, all-embracing ‘theories’ they often limit their investigations to a few well-worn concepts and to a few facts. The net result is that the history of philosophy is littered with ‘tidy-looking dichotomies’1 and the student is under the mistaken impression that, if he is to make progress in philosophy, he has to embrace one half of a given dichotomy – he has to produce arguments to show that man is free or that man is not free, he has to take a view on the reality of the material world or its unreality, and so on.
