One of the striking features of intellectual life in the last hundred years or so is the way in which quite diverse traditions of philosophy have been cultivated in different countries. That is true even within different European countries, before we go any further afield, say to North America, let alone to India, or to what is still often sweepingly referred to as ‘the Far East’. This is not just a matter of the particular fads and fashions cultivated in the philosophical journals in different languages: it is a matter also of what counts as ‘philosophy’, of the way it is taught, the basic curricula of departments of philosophy in the universities. To speak personally, for a moment, in the Cambridge of the early 1950s, where I received my philosophical formation, almost no attention was paid, in the Faculty of Moral Sciences (as it was then known), to large areas of continental philosophy, including phenomenology and even existentialism. True, some reference to Sartre was made in the English faculty, for they ran a paper called ‘The English Moralists’, which began, astonishingly, with Plato and Aristotle. But in those days in Cambridge, the history of philosophy was sharply contrasted with doing philosophy proper. The former was devalued as essentially antiquarian: the latter was the real thing, to be practised in the style of the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations.