Peter Winch: Philosophy as the Art of Disagreement

Abstract

Peter Winch’s work spans most of the main areas of philosophy. His early work dealt with the philosophy of the social sciences and with the problem of understanding alien cultures. Later on he returned to these issues on on-ly a handful of occasions. Winch’s later work concerned itself, most prom-inently, with moral and political philosophy, but also with the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. One of his most widely noted essays of later years is one in which he discusses the intelligibility of the suggestion that an object might simply cease to ex-ist. At the time of his death, he was at work on a monograph on political authority.