Stephen Toulmin died earlier this month .
He was a leader of the generation that come of age after World War II and made its way out of the wilderness of logical positivism. An enemy of arid rationalism and the foolish belief in the omni-competence of science, his work did a great deal to revive in the English-speaking world the tradition of philosophy pursued by way of living contact with history and culture.
His Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1992) is well worth reading and re-reading.
