As a political philosopher he’s very important as a kind of default position: everybody else takes up political philosophy where he leaves off and tries to brighten it up a bit in one way or another.

In all the world we are only men and women. Here we could talk about universal structure. Of course, we are different no doubt, but the most basic is that humanity reproduced through generations throughout the world; they make love throughout the world; there are only men and women of different age, of different class, of different race, throughout the world. It’s the most basic.

It is by now something of a cliché of Green discourse that environmental degradation and devastation is grounded in a sharp opposition – the legacy, it is often charged, of Christian metaphysics – between the human and the non-human, between the realms of culture and nature. If one is to understand, let alone endorse, the very general environmentalist ambition to dissolve the dualism of the human and the non-human, it is by questioning rather more tractable and particular dichotomies, like that between art and nature appreciation, where it would seem wise to begin.

Wittgenstein’s rejection of philosophical theories doesn’t mean that he, or whoever adopts his method, couldn’t have any positive views about the objects of philosophical investigation. It merely means not presenting those views in a dogmatic manner, as theses that all relevant cases must fit. Wittgenstein’s approach allows one not to take sides in philosophical disputes and to take on board whatever might be correct in the traditional theories.

The multiverse is a hypothesis for which there is no evidence, and perhaps can never be any evidence. It is only since 1998 that it has leapt off the blackboards of a few physicists doing esoteric mathematics and lodged itself in the popular imagination. As is the way with popular science, it is easy to move from speculating that there might have been more than one big bang to proceeding on the basis that there has been more than one big bang.

What hubris could possibly have lead me to think that, after two and a half millennia of unsuccessful attempts to answer questions concerning the One and the Many, Reality and Appearance, or Good and Evil, I should have definitive answers to offer; that I should be able to give the final word to problems that have thwarted others for eons? The all-encompassing scope of philosophical problems, not to mention their quality, or the sheer number of previous failures to answer them, should act as a caution against any further attempts to offer any final words.

Philosophers should not be put off by the preconceived notion that there is nothing of interest or value to be gained from acquaintance with that hybrid genre of writing that is vaguely and for the most part disparagingly known as “theory”. For it is in just this long disputed border-zone where philosophy comes into contact (or conflict) with language at its most inventive, unpredictable and wayward that thought may find itself venturing onto ground that has not yet been trodden into ruts by the keepers of received philosophical-linguistic lore.

I knew that this was a book a long time in the making, and one that bore the mark of many years of teaching the philosophy discussed in the work. As a publisher, you come to learn that those who have taught courses on what they’re writing about tend to do a better job than those who haven’t, especially when it comes to books, like this one, intended for a wider audience.

How we share the world, what conceptual framework might allow us to grasp the sharing, once the bleak world-in-itself is unavailable and all we have are our personalised worlds, remains a total mystery. Science can get along quite well without solving it, but cosmologists need to take it seriously. For philosophers, however, that the world we take for granted is a conceptual mess poses a problem.

To Kant’s mind, all of the tasks that Western philosophical thought has traditionally assigned to the deity as institutor of a rational world-order do indeed need to be accomplished, but humanity – we mere mortals – are up to the task. What we have here is a philosophy not so much of enlightenment as of enormous hubris.

Had I not read that book in the months leading up to my university finals I might never have gained that real enthusiasm and excitement for ideas which has possessed me ever since. Before that time I played with the academic world in a desultory fashion, moving the thoughts, thinkers and theories in front of me as though they were merely so many counters. After I read Collingwood everything changed, and I believe the same can be true for any of its readers.

Many philosophers are little devoted to the love of wisdom. In only a merely “academic” way do they aspire to intellectual virtue. Even less often do they exhibit qualities of moral excellence. On the contrary, many philosophers, or what pass as philosophers, are, sadly, better described as petty social climbers, meretricious snobs, and acquisitive consumerists

Logical theory – and philosophical theory generally – is just that, theory. Generations of logic students felt a sort of unease about it without knowing what to do about it. Nowadays, students of mathematical logic feel a similar unease when faced with the fact that in standard predicate calculus, “All unicorns are sneaky” is true precisely because there are no unicorns. Blanché’s analysis reminds us that such feelings of unease may indicate a shortcoming in the theory rather than in the student’s understanding.