of knowledge, not only on the grounds that it seeks to link together the
results of the various sciences and to contrast and relate with each other
their diverse methods, but also in that it seeks to create a unified view of
the world out of the facts ascertained by science and the values that emerge
from the social experience of mankind. By some of their major charac-
teristics, a number of currently 'living' philosophies correspond to an ideal
of this type, in spite of the profound differences which separate them. Marx-
ism, as inherited through Engels and Lenin, pre-eminently presents that all‐
embracing structure: its inherent realism combines itself with the epistemo-
logical aspects of its notion of reality, and with practice, in a vast unified
synthesis; but other schools too share in varying degrees the same ideal of
philosophic achievement: for one example, those types of thinking which can
be traced back to Hegelianism, especially the Hegelianism of the Ency-
clopaedia; for another, the various 'scientists' philosophies' which call for
a synthesis of cosmology and anthropology within some kind of all-em-
bracing apprehension; finally, in yet another way, those streams of thought
which derive from the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis.

2. At the opposite extreme from this ambitious ideal, we find deliberately
modest modes of philosophizing, according to which science alone provides
an image of reality, an image to which philosophy is quite unable to add.
The task assigned to philosophy is then to cure philosophy itself of its ill-
founded claim to know more and better than science. This reductionist and
therapeutic conception is generally linked with an investigation of language
and of its grammar, the warping and misuse of which are, in their various
forms, held responsible for the illusions of philosophy. In this overall con-
ception, the theory of propositions and of speech-acts holds the place that
is held by the theory of reality in the preceding conception. Moreover,
philosophers holding this conception tend frequently to make use of analyt-
ical techniques, that is, both of the decomposition of propositions into simple
(or more simple) ones, and of the reformulation of complex propositions
according to strict rules of derivation.This analytical style stands in contrast
with the synthetic style of the preceding schools of thought. This second
stream is represented most notably by English-and American analytic philo-
sophy and by its diverse variations in Europe and throughout the world.
These general characteristics allow, nevertheless, for considerable differences,
according to whether one expects symbolic logic to provide a model for the
reformulation of ordinary language, or whether one takes ordinary language
to be characteristically irreducible to any such reformulations; the only
justification for setting up an overall contrast between this and the first
tendency lies in the general task which it assigns to philosophy — which is to
increase not the realm of facts but the understanding which we have of them
— and the related emphasis on language.

However, these two attitudes, standing in polar opposition, do not ex-
haust the entire field of possibles; they merely provide a framework for
identifying and locating the other overall conceptions of philosophy, in

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