Philosophy in a New Key [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1951 In offering Philosophy in a New Key to the public once more, this time to a larger part of the English-speaking world, I have made no changes (except for small corrections) in the original text. After nine years one naturally sees the imperfections of a work and wishes it were better; but so long as one can still subscribe to its contents as a whole it is more important, perhaps, to carry the intellectual venture forward than to revise small details of its first formulation. Modern theory of knowledge, leading naturally to a critique of science, represents the best philosophical work of our time. But "knowledge" is not synonymous with "human mentality." It is the intent of this book to establish a theory of mind which shall support that excellent treatment of science, and furthermore lead to an equally serious and detailed critique of art. Chapters VIII and IX — "On Significance in Music" and "The Genesis of Artistic Import" — purport to point the way to that second inquiry. They are, of course, no more than preliminary and limited studies, and do not establish the power of the premises here assumed to cope with the entire problem of the nature and structure of art; but they assay the new ground. A book which is the beginning of a line of thought can be judged only in retrospect, when the relative importance of its several ideas emerges by virtue of the further developments of which they show themselves capable and any major defects in their foundations have had time to come to light. In the years which have elapsed since the first edition of this book appeared, I have put its general tenets to the test by working out the philosophy of art they promised, and so far I have found them amazingly fertile, leading from novelty to novelty in a realm of theory that has long been imponderable or purely academic. It is with this pragmatic assurance, there-