ABSTRACT
Shortly after his retirement – at the end of a 1959 volume dedicated to an exploration of his work – C.D. Broad wrote: though philosophies are never refuted, they rapidly go out of fashion, and the kind of philosophy which he has practised has become antiquated without having yet acquired the interest of a collector’s piece. Broad was self-deprecating; in a letter to Mind, responding to a review of the volume from which this quotation is taken, he referred to the series as ‘Schilpp’s Library of Moribund Philosophers’. In philosophy of science, the resurgent interest in the concept of ‘emergence’ is usually prefaced with the acknowledgement that Broad did much to clarify and develop the idea in his 1925 book The Mind and Its Place in Nature. In the history of the sense-data theory of perception, and its ongoing discussion, Broad’s paper ‘Some elementary reflections on sense-perception’ is an essential source.
