Philosophy and Mystification: A Reflection on Nonsense and Clarity

I can only concur with Jerry's review of this book.
However, Guy's other book, Philosophy and Demystification, is now available at my site: http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/other_material.htm#Guy_Robinsons_Essays
Rosa Lichtenstein 

This is an amazing book of essays. I keep coming back to it time and time again to dip into its wisdom. Just rereading the Introduction and the first chapter, "Understanding Nonsense", brings me so much clarity that I can return to reading other things with a renewed sense of what language, thinking, and philosophy are all about. And to my mind "mystification" is something that is done by many other people besides philosophers. Scientists and other humanists do it too … in fact, the kind of "mystification" Robinson talks about is rampant whenever people misuse language, which is to say, in WIttgenstein's sense, use words in careless, irresponsible ways outside of the contexts that resemble "their original home". Distinguishing these uses from uses that are more along the lines of creative metaphors and "seeings-as" requires some skill and attention to nuances of language, but these are things at which Robinson (and Wittgenstein) excel. In many cases, the "misuses" are deployed to create "mysteries" or "problems" that we then supposedly need to solve, but seeing through the misuse(s) -- which sometimes requires untangling quite a web of discourse -- often dissolves the mystery.
There are places where the prose in this book is itself difficult to untangle, but it is worth the work … hence the revisiting … and the set of essays as a whole do indeed have a coherent story to tell so the more of them one reads, the more "clarity" one achieves regarding that overall message; it's quite an enlightening experience.
I have recently found out that Robinson has written a second book of essays entitled _Philosophy and demystification_, still, unfortunately, in search of a publisher. I'd love to get my hands on it. If you're smart, you'll definitely want to get your hands on this, though.
             - Jerry Balzano, UC San Diego