English Philosophy

Here is a useful characterization of English philosophy from John M. Bullitt's Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire: A Study of Satiric Technique:

It is often maintained by historians of philosophy that England has had only one school of philosophy, or rather, that it has had none at all, for its philosophy is a perpetual protest against Scholasticism. A faith in experimental science, based upon empirical evidence of the senses, and a complementary distrust of scholastic and rationalistic a priori speculation, may be said to form the cornerstone of the English philosophical tradition. Although Swift developed no systematic philosophy--this absence, too, seems to be characteristic of the tentative and experimental English mind--a peculiarly English and to some degree Lockeian nexus of assumptions underlies one major area of his satiric technique. [Jonathan Swift strikes] at the affectation of those who, by formula and artifice, impose some rigid subjective perception upon the world and then pay honor to this graven image as truth and to themselves as its discoverers. The folly of man's refusal to see things as they really are is thus consistently translated by Swift into symbolic representations of man as a mechanism. Inflexible, blinded to external truth by his own conceit, contentious in his assumption of the infallibility of his subjective responses, man becomes a puppet in life's Punch-and-Judy show of artifice, system and self-delusion.

It's a telling passage, and it prompts a pleasant memory.  Over three decades ago I was walking through the MET with this book clasped behind my back. This was in the long atrium gallery in the European sculpture and decorative arts section; it was so crowded that people were close, though the pace was brisk. A voice said, "That's a good book."  I turned to see the smiling face of a middle-aged man walking behind me. Hovering beside him, his wife was looking on with mild owlish approval; more at him than the book, I recall. I happily agreed, "Yes it is, a very good book."

Some things have very little to do with other things, but they're connected anyway, moreover philosophy has very little to do with it. And that, for now, is the point.

Source: John M. Bullitt Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire: A Study of Satiric Technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, p.124