At the same time, there is no denying the fact that different experts
find different ideas in the writings of the same philosopher. This is as
true of the appreciative interpreter and grateful disciple as it is of the
critical opponent. Nor can it be denied that such differences of reading
and of interpretation on the part of other experts often leave the neo-
phyte aghast before the whole maze of widely varying and even oppos-
ing interpretations. Who is right and whose interpretation shall he
accept? When the doctors disagree among themselves, what is the poor
student to do? If, in desperation, he decides that all of the interpreters
are probably wrong and that the only thing for him to do is to go back
to the original writings of the philosopher himself and then make his
own decision -- uninfluenced (as if this were possible) by the inter-
pretation of any one else -- the result is not that he has actually come to
the meaning of the original philosopher himself, but rather that he has
set up one more interpretation, which may differ to a greater or lesser
degree from the interpretations already existing. It is clear that in this
direction lies chaos, just the kind of chaos which Schiller has so graph-
ically and inimitably described. ¹

It is curious that until now no way of escaping this difficulty has
been seriously considered. It has not occurred to students of philosophy
that one effective way of meeting the problem at least partially is to
put these varying interpretations and critiques before the philosopher
while he is still alive and to ask him to act at one and the same time as
both defendant and judge. If the world's great living philosophers can
be induced to co-operate in an enterprise whereby their own work can,
at least to some extent, be saved from becoming merely "dessicated
lecture-fodder," which on the one hand "provides innocuous suste-
nance for ruminant professors," and, on the other hand, gives an oppor-
tunity to such ruminants and their understudies to "speculate safely,
endlessly, and fruitlessly, about what a philosopher must have meant"
( Schiller), they will have taken a long step toward making their
intentions clearly comprehensible.

With this in mind, The Library of Living Philosophers expects to
publish at more or less regular intervals a volume on each of the
greater among the world's living philosophers. In each case it will be
the purpose of the editor of the Library to bring together in the volume
the interpretations and criticisms of a wide range of that particular
thinker's scholarly contemporaries, each of whom will be given a free

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