Here; an excerpt:
So, first of all, my approach is very obviously indebted to Collingwood, and what he called the logic of question and answer. He and his numerous followers always insisted that the history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral and political philosophy, should be written as an account, not of how different answers were produced for a set of canonical questions, but rather as a subject in which the questions as well as the answers are always changing, and in which the questions are set by the specific moral and political issues that seem most salient, most troubling, at different times — and they will continually change and people will continually find that the pressures of their societies are operating in such a way as to raise new questions. So, there’s one source that really mattered to me very much: Collingwood’s wonderful discussion in his autobiography of the logic of question and answer.
But secondly, my approach is even more obviously indebted to Wittgenstein and to his followers in the philosophy of language, and especially J.L. Austin. And what I think of as central to Wittgenstein — you could call his methodology, if you like — is that the concepts of meaning and understanding are not correlative concepts. That’s to say, there is more to understanding an utterance than recovering its meaning. As Wittgenstein always emphasised, ‘words are also deeds’. So, to understand anything that’s been said needs you to attend, not just to the meaning of what someone is saying, but also what they’re doing and saying it — and there is Austin’s famous phrase, ‘how to do things with words’. People are always doing things; speaking is a form of social action. But actually, I think you can go even further than Wittgenstein and Austin here and say that, in political philosophy, the speakers and writers — what they’re going to be doing is, roughly speaking, always aiming either to legitimize or delegitimize some existing state of affairs. And it’s existing states of affairs — the existing political questions and problems — that give them the subject matter on which they then work.
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