“
Incompatible with one another (and often at odds with themselves), the three
were widely seen as plotting the course of modernity toward a future without reli-
gion and indeed without normative ethics. Today these threats, if not vanished, are
diminished, almost to mockeries of their former magnitude and hubris. The Soviet
embodiment of the Marxist idea has collapsed, as untenable politically and
economically as apartheid proved to be. Logical positivism is now a historical cu-
riosity. Philosophers who want to dig up the roots of our current philosophical
plantings often find it necessary to explain just what positivism was and tell the
story of the rival ideas that motivated otherwise intelligent thinkers to suppose that
verificationism circumscribed the possibilities of meaning. And, of course, the
doctrinaire behaviorism of Watson and Skinner that once proposed to do psy-
chology without any idea of minds or thoughts, intentions or even dispositions,
and dismissed as outmoded the ideals of human freedom and dignity, is itself a thing of the past, quaint as the brass microscopes that might decorate an antique
shop window, no longer proposed for serious scientific use.
”
”