this paper by timothy williamson (one of the most eminent contemporary philosophers; i am struggling into his modal logic as metaphysics) is very fascinating. it's a history/memoir about the sneaky and then explicit revival of metaphysics within the analytic tradition, with characters including ayer, strawson, and kripke. in general there's a lot of interesting history of analytic philosophy emerging these days.
williamson writes this about his supervisor at oxford, the anti-realist philosopher of language michael dummett. "He was remarkably tolerant of the strident realism of my thesis, which effectively presupposed the futility of his life's work and pursued other issues from that starting point." that was around 1980. i might have written that sentence about my thesis with rorty, except that i probably at this point wouldn't put quite so much swashbuckle in it. i was a realist - the most extreme realist i could figure out how to be - but in 1988 i was not ready to really do rorty any damage. i am now. but he's not there anymore. but he too was remarkably tolerant, here of my combined anti-rortyanism and incompetence. i have this funny feeling that by 1980, when he was about 25, timothy williamson was fully as formidable as dummett, but i guess one wouldn't know without reading the thesis. i always thought those giant dummett books on frege etc went from awfully precise-seeming to awfully fuzzy-seeming right at the point where the anti-realist conclusions started flowing.
but, all this time, philosophers of the generation after people like dummett and rorty have been yearning in a thousand ways for a return to the real world. i actually think this is intensified by the cyber-world and the screen world and virtual realities etc etc. in that atmosphere people yearn for a real physical environment. sometimes philosophy floats like this: as a negative image of the culture or an expression of its yearnings away from itself.
