Online research in philosophy

Intellectualism is the view that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. The most famous objection to this view is Gilbert Ryle’s objection that it must be false on pain of avoiding an infinite and vicious regress. However, despite its fame, the status of this objection is highly contested. The aim of this paper is to clarify and advance the often rather confusing debates about whether there is a successful regress argument against intellectualism. Towards this end, I identify what I take (...) to be the most basic and plausible form of a regress argument against intellectualism—the employment regress. I argue that the employment regress fails and then use this conclusion to help clarify and criticise other regress arguments in the literature. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept a view according to which intuitions are crucial evidence in philosophy. Recently, Williamson (2004, 2007: ch. 1) has argued that such views are best abandoned because they lead to a psychologistic conception of philosophical evidence that encourages scepticism about the armchair judgements relied upon in philosophy. In this paper I respond to this criticism by showing how the intuition picture can be formulated in such a way that: (i) it is consistent with a wide range of views (...) about not only philosophical evidence but also the nature of evidence in general, including Williamson's famous view that E = K; (ii) it can maintain the central claims about the nature and role of intuitions in philosophy made by proponents of the intuition picture; (iii) it does not collapse into Williamson's own deflationary view of the nature and role of intuitions in philosophy; and (iv) it does not lead to scepticism. (shrink)

Often philosophers have reason to ask fundamental questions about the aims, methods, nature, or value of their own discipline. When philosophers systematically examine such questions, the resulting work is sometimes referred to as “metaphilosophy.” Metaphilosophy, it should be said, is not a well-established, or clearly demarcated, field of philosophical inquiry like epistemology or the philosophy of art. However, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries there has been a great deal of metaphilosophical work on issues concerning the methodology of (...) philosophy in the analytic tradition. This article focuses on that work. (shrink)