Geuss Raymond. Who Needs a World View?

Harvard University Press, 2020. — 209 p. — ISBN 978-0674-247-222My most impor­tant teacher at university, Sidney Morgenbesser, used to play a game which I privately called “pantheons.” (As far as I know, he himself had no word for the game.) As a good polytheist, Sidney
thought that if ­there was such a ­thing as a god, ­there would have to be several such entities, and prob­ably a ­whole hierarchy of beings of dif­fer­ent ontological status, entertaining complicated relations with each other. If all the phi­los­o­phers in history ­were considered to be the domain of reference, ­there would be the “major divinities,” “minor deities,” “demigods,” “heroes,” “mere ­humans,” and “all-­too-­human ­humans” (a category, to be sure, which, for other reasons, held ­little interest for Sidney). Since Sidney was an extraordinarily gifted phi­los­o­pher, he was more interested in the considerations one could marshal to place par­tic­u­lar figures in a par­tic­u­lar category—­that is, in the question of what constituted being a “major divinity”—­than he was in which par­tic­u­lar person got placed in which box. So depending
on the context and the way the discussion proceeded, dif­fer­ent phi­los­o­phers got shifted from one category to the other. One could also play the game with a restriction to a par­tic­u­lar ­century, say 1850–1950 (a natu­ral period to pick, if one ­were playing the game in, say, 1965). Despite the migration of phi­los­o­phers from one group to another over time, ­there ­were some vis­i­ble regularities, the most striking