Imagine a well—trained mid—century American philosopher, caught in a rare traffic jam on the New ]ersey Turnpike one warm summer afternoon in the early 1950s. He dozes in his warm car and awakes in the same spot on a chill Fall evening in the late 1990s, remembering nothing of the intervening years. It is as if he has been asleep at the wheel for almost half a century! Let’s suppose that he sees the up side of his peculiar situation. Phenomenologically, it is on a par with time travel, and what self—respecting philosopher could fail to be excited by that? Of course, he realises that it is far is more likely that he is suffering from amnesia than that he has actually been transported more than forty years into the future, or survived for that long on the Turnpike—but all the more reason to savour the experience while he can, lest his memory should soon return. Indeed, he soon becomes a celebrity, written up by Oliver Sachs in The New Yar/e Times. Irreverent graduate students call him (with apologies to Beth 1965, p. 478) the Carnap* of contemporary philosophy, and everyone is interested in his impressions of modern life. What will surprise him about the society in which he finds himself? Any Australian philosopher who knows contemporary New York will find it easy to imagine some of the things that might stand out: the number of people who ask for change for a cup of coffee, the mind—numbing range of options available when he buys his own cup of coffee, the fact that all the options are mediocre, and so on. But let°s suppose that Carnap* has the true philosopher’s ability to ignore all of this. He wants to know what has happened to his own beloved discipline. “Never mind the beggars and the Starbucks!”, he says, °‘Where are the big strides in philosophy this past half century? At this point, I think, Australian intuitions are less reliable. Australian philosophical...