General Introduction

In the Introduction, the editors of this volume give a capsule history of the rise and fall of the ideal of systematicity in the analytic philosophical tradition. The story begins earlier, with the German idealists, who demanded that philosophy have the form of a system. While they disagreed about the content of that system, a shared conception of the form of that system can be discerned: it begins with some first principle, immanently develops the rest of that system from that first principle, and ends when it has returned to the first principle, thus constituting a system. This massively ambitious conception of system was then taken up and revised by the British idealists, who held a strong version of ontological monism: everything is what it is, in virtue of its relation to everything else. Consequently, in order to understand anything as the thing it is, one must understand everything. One of the founding motives of early analytic philosophy, shared by Russell and Moore, was the rejection of this demand for systematic understanding (and the holistic metaphysics that lay behind it). Philosophy can pursue its questions piecemeal, in imitation of the natural sciences, and leave systematicity behind. This sets the stage for the discussion of systematicity, both in the history of philosophy and in contemporary metaphysics, that is taken up in the individual essays in this volume.