Kingston Philosophy Café

At 20:00 Jim Grant will discuss metaphor and philosophy's claim to arrive at objective truth.

In The Philosophy of Rhetoric, I.A.Richards says:

In philosophy, above all, we can take no step safely without an unrelaxing awareness of the metaphors we, and our audience, may be employing; and though we may pretend to eschew them, we can attempt to do so only by detecting them.  And this is the more true, the more severe and abstract the philosophy is.  As it grows more abstract we think increasingly by means of metaphors we profess not to be relying on.  The metaphors we avoid steer our thought as much as those we accept.

This prompts the question I wish to discuss. If metaphor is as central to philosophical thinking as Richards implies, does this not call in question philosophy’s claim to be able arrive a genuine objective truth?