Перевести текст philosophy and common sense philosophy has always existed in a kind of tension between common sense and the construction of theories about the nature of reality. philosophy arises out of common sense, but philosophy of¬ ten goes well beyond common sense in working out theories which seem to be implied or suggested by common sense. in the end, how¬ ever, the ultimate court of appeal for the philosopher is again com¬mon sense and ordinary reasonableness. as one philosopher put it, it is like an airplane which takes off from the ground to fly high in the sky, but which must ultimately return again to earth. often the two forces which make up this tension — the ten¬dency to speculate widely and freely and the common sense to pull back to earth — are fairly equally balanced, and philosophy is both constructive and critical. but when either gains the advantage for a time, philosophy becomes predominantly critical or constructive. some philosophers and some philosophies, we said were primarily critical, concerned with defining our terms, analyzing our assump¬tions, getting our arguments straight, and less concerned with deve¬loping theories or getting the “right” answers. other philosophers and philosophies were primarily constructive in the sense that their main aim was to answer questions, to discover the truth, and to state and defend theories about these answers. what we are now saying is that in the twentieth century there was first a concentration almost exclu¬sively on philosophy as critical, broken only in the past fifteen years or so by a gradual return to a more constructive philosophy of sub¬stantive issues and the attempt to provide answers to basic questions. broadly speaking, the history of the twentieth-century philosophy can be characterized as the swing of the pendulum away from self-con¬fident theorizing on the most basic issues of life toward a more cau¬tious and more limited conception of philosophy as clarifying common sense ideas which everyone already possesses. that movement was fol¬lowed by the reverse swing of the pendulum away from self-doubt and back to normative issues and systematic theory building.
