(Meta-Philosophy) Why read philosophy? (of original and –creative thinking rather than derivative, academic, professional philosophers) Ulrich de Balbian Director Meta-philosophy Research Center 1 Bereft of all feeling, deprived of all passion, devoid of sense, robbed of its humanity and stripped of any humaneness ‘philosophy’ had become when in the hands of mostly anglo-saxon, so-called analytic ‘philosophers’ and mostly white, male, seemingly confused, elderly , ‘continental ‘philosophers. The passion that drives the thinker through the Socratic questioning are forgotten and the slight glimpse of a vision of the golden dawn now and then revealed in Heidegger by the lover of wisdom are replaced by pseudo-logic aspirations and sterile mathematical notions of those who produce an infinity of peer reviewed articles and endless writings to fulfil the contract of their tenure as paid, professional thinkers who must produce on the academic assembly-line of living off ‘philosophy’. We are left we the bare bones of semantics expressed by the semiotics that are reflected by the norms of reasoning and some form of, usually informal, logic. Why do philosophy, why grasp, approach and ring out the blood from almost anything, any thing, any thought, and why read every word and grasp its wrestling for meaning with the philosopher who tears them out of his heart, cleansed by his mind, why try to tune in to his stream of consciousness in an attempt to share that what he tries to catch a fleeting glimpse of and express by means of ideas, words, concepts, phrase, propositions, statements and sentences? We read philosophy so as to tune into the life, the existence, the passion, the fear, the dread, the occasional delight and happiness felt by the thinker wrestling all day and all night, like Jacob, with THE ONE. We will not let go of the slim hold we have on the tunic of the Beloved until, with the seeker we arrived at knowing intimately the one, the one real self, our real SELF, the Sufi Beloved, the Gottheit or Godhead of Meister Eckhart and the long line of mystical lovers. This is what the reader discovers when he attempts over and over and over again, to grasp what Heidegger is trying to uncover, what those like Socrates and Hegel attempt to reveal – that what gives meaning to life in spite of all its pain, its dread, the violence of war, the anguish of rape, the hurt of a loved one murdered, the child ripped away out of the mother’s arms by the all-equalizing one, the grim reaper. We seek the few fleeting moments of tranquillity, of inner peace, all contemplatives seek and that a few original- and creative-thinking philosophers occasionally get hold of by means of flashes of intuition in their consciousness and struggle to find suitable words to express them in signs that reveal them and make them visible, known by means of intersubjective tools – to anyone who seeks passionately, who wishes to listen to the almost silent voice of reason. Attempting to enter the thoughts, the consciousness of the lover of Sophia, the yearning after her wisdom, is the prize of the lover and seeker of absolute intimacy with Sophos. The thinker who engages Sophos allows us to share in his most intimate embrace his Biblical knowing of his Beloved – this is what the one who reads philosophy realizes – the poetry of the lover singing the beauty, truth and meaning of the Beloved. The reader is allowed to enter this secret chamber and being led by the words of the philosopher can, almost as if s/he himself is the lover employ the philosopher’s words to re-create his thought and sing out the poetry of the love of wisdom. THIS is why one reads philosophy. To share the intimacy the thinker expressed in words, his oneness with wisdom, the reader is allowed to trace through every word, every thought, every movement of consciousness and thus s/he can himself become one/d with the Beloved grasped and held, beholden and revealed by ideas, by reasoned thinking, not unlike the midwife pulls out the bits of meaning by means of dialogue in ancient Greece. Many aspects of what the original-and creative-thinking philosopher reveals and allows us to share by the intersubjective means of language, concepts, signs and consciousness crystalized as words, appear not unlike poetry. Like the life experienced by the poet when she says something about the rule for living a life, as Mary Oliver in her ‘instructions for living a life’, shares with us, with those who wish to listen - Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it! Why read philosophy, why write philosophy, why do philosophy, why philosophy……. It is the need to struggle to get hold of some of the meaning of life, the passion to make some sense of the fleeting moments I, we, one spend on this planet, earth confined, in a seemingly vast, endless, often hostile reality and universe. My painting of my, now deceased, dog (bottom right) in the mist under a tree in my garden. Why read philosophy, why write philosophy, why do philosophy ….it is like you stick, force your hand, your arm deep, deep, deep down into your most into parts, through your pliable brain, into some dark, endless Freudian hole and pull out handfuls of mass, formless mass, and then the first signs of some meaning are forced into that mass, through deep pain you produce some initial meaning as shown here in images, my visual art – the initial step, then this so-called intuition are slowly transformed into concepts, gradually constituted into the forms of meanings, clay, paste, damp formless dough are sculpted by simple signs into intersubjective meanings… isolated thoughts that gives shape to formless, imageless intuitive grasps for meaning, for sense.. and slowly in spite of the severe pain they are given more recognizable shape – the concepts that begin to make sense, the first seconds of visible forms on the first day of creation, and scalpels of logic are sliced into them to make them meaningful by giving them a reasoned appearance – these are the products presented in a more ordered, reasoned form by means of visual shapes and perhaps, eventually as arguments – arguments to present to the reader the ordered, formerly shapeless intuitive mass of sparks, are forced into concepts, propositions, statements and birth is given to isolated insights of sense and gradually compelled by the force of reason to sentences of sense. This is what, the end result, the reader is shown, this is what the reader takes hold of, simple words and try to follow them up to get hold of what the philosopher has tried to express and communicate. 2 Some, hopefully the most important aspects of the most relevant, subconscious, pre-conceptual, experience have been brought to conscious awareness as the stuff of intuition and jotted down in some verbal, visual, diagrammatic manner. Now the philosopher attempts to retain, with as little cognitive bias as possible to identify the relevant features of this intuitive awareness and try to constitute them as some form of conceptualized mind set, in the most open minded way or manner as possible. Much of so-called Continental philosophical ideas concern this stage of pre-conceptual awareness and the beginnings of conceptualized consciousness. When these things have been brought more explicitly into verbal or conceptual tools and arranged in some logical form by means of reasoning or arguments we arrive at the areas where so-called analytical philosophy often are the preferred approach. At this stage the philosopher begins to do things with words, reasoning, logic of some kind, arguments and argumentation – ways to construct his mind set, frame of reference and cognitive contents in a visual and most often a verbal form. The latter is what the reader of philosophical material is presented with. That is where he might find the string of meaning that he is to identify and grasp, hold on to and follow through the darkness of non-sense, the cave of ignorance, to the light of meaning at the other side of the tunnel. This is how he attempts to lock into the verbally crystalized or conceptually expressed strings of ideas of the philosopher – if they make intersubjective sense and are presented in inter-subjectively meaningful and logical ways. These are the strings of meaning the reader, who becomes the co-thinker in the dialogue, hold on and follow, in so far as they are meaningful, reasonable, rational and sound – if his cognitive attitudes and biases, experience, knowledge and level of understanding allow it. In the so-called Socratic methods of doing philosophy we see the ideas being explore, identified, shown and revealed very gradually by the interchange of words of those involved in the discourse. Words are not merely uttered in an objective manner but are meant to represent, depict and make visible not only the thoughts, but also the underlying attitudes, values and norms of those producing them. They depict the mind set, the reality, life world and consciousness of those who use and utter them. With the result that when these words are being modified, the logic they are being used in terms of and the reasoning they express are identified, made explicit and altered the associated beliefs, mind set, values, state of awareness, attitudes,, existence and life of the individual are being transformed – hopefully into a more meaningful, a more reasonable, a more rational, moral and human one. All this, all that what takes place in dialogue, are meant to occur by and during the reading of written philosophical words and works – in this case the dialogue of rational persuasion are in a written form and the reader himself must assist in the enlivening, the energizing, the bringing to life the intended meanings represented by the written words and phrases. 3 We began with the intuitive rising from the subconscious of experiences gathered over time that became sudden flickers of insight. But these things are seldom presented to the reader in written form. We find instead articles that respond to other articles concerning very specialized niche problems or to minute, detailed problems from the repertoire of work of established and well known figures. This is what readers are encountering, the finished products of philosophical thought, traditionally they are presented to the reader as a complete, speculative, metaphysical system, that includes an epistemology, ontology and methodology. Or, work may concentrate on one or more of these areas and in a finalized, clinical form. Regardless of the form of the finished product they are far removed from the seemingly simple, but –ism, speculative and metaphysical free Socratic conversations. Is it therefore the case that we must make decisions right at the beginning of our philosophizing if we wish to opt for the Socratic or Philosophical Investigations speculative, -ism and metaphysical free path or for the, mostly amateurish kind of theory-building and –construction, systematic, -ism type – in either the logic obsessed anglo-saxon manner or the almost fictional phantasies of the so-called continental schools and their followers? Are we dealing with the same type of thing, the philosophical discourse, when we explore these two opposing approaches, or are there many different kinds of philosophical discourses, disciplines and socio-cultural practices? The Socratic and PI ones seem to have less grandiose aims, apparently concentrating on the clarification of some ideas, words, terms and the usage associated with them, so as to identify, reveal and perhaps modify underlying or associated norms, values and attitudes, while the Continental ones wish to reform the world, often with a tint of a yearning for the lost utopia of Marxism, or the Anglophone satellites and linguistic colonies worshipping the ideals of the gods of mathematics, logic and science. Both of these academic tribes with their many mini-tribal sub-cultures and their emphasis on professionalization are very far removed from the aims of the philosophizing of PI or Socrates. So far, that one wonders what, if anything they do still have in common? 4 Much of Anglo-phone philosophy (both the subject-matter, methodology, techniques, methods and tools) has gradually become during the last centuries a concentration on explicit, logic (formal, informal, etc) and argumentation-orientated phenomena. Compare this, implications and consequences with those of the Socratic methods and PI, their visions, ideals, purposes, aims, values and norms. In these, where reasoning, argumentation and logic play a role, of course and important one, and have many, serious, functions, but they are not the sole occupation, the main factors that determine the way philosophy, its aims, tools and discourse are interpreted. And they are not the i) only and ii) ultimate norm and standard for the evaluation of the a) doing of philosophy and the b) nature of the philosophical subject-matter, its aims, purpose and norms of i) how it must be done and ii) what philosophy is subject-matter and iii) method-wise. 5 THE, great names in philosophy work in giant, universal strokes, they deal with the big and new, big pictures (of visions of philosophy, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, reality and the nature of existence and that what exists), general frameworks that reveal original theories and theoretical insights, models and paradigms* – and not in minute, detailed, microscopic, technical explorations and mostly irrelevant questions that are mere variations on currently accepted, ruling, established –isms and ideologies, as found in scholarly, academic theses and programmes or research suitable for peer-reviewed articles and journals. 6 *with the result that they transform, re-create, re-invent and re-interpret in revolutionary and drastic ways the entire landscape of philosophy, the discourse of this socio-cultural practice and thereby transform notions of what philosophy is, what it could be, what it should be as far as subject-matter goes and how it should and could be done as far as its methods are concerned. 7 In these ways they, in in his own way, move beyond the ‘philosophy’ as ‘some form of logic-determined discourse’, of the socio-cultural practice of philosophy conceived as the expression of ‘logic’ and the perception of the philosophical enterprise as reduced to ‘logic’. As the young and obviously arrogant and quite ignorant owner of the New Realism group on Facebook states: philosophers are logicians! 8 But, where does the creative- and original thinking philosopher get his original, new and fresh subject-matter from? He ‘invents’ ** it intuitively, by means of the new, big picture, a new frame of reference, a new general framework, a new paradigm – that may or may not be meaningful, that may or may not be relevant and that may or may not be ‘better’, more functional or useful than the current, reigning one/s. This new frame of reference enables and allows the conception of a new reality, new life-worlds, alternative universes or multiverses, populated by new objects. This new subject-matter or the new perception of existing ones are possible by the conceptually ordered intuitions that have their origin in the past experiences drifting around in the thinkers pre-, or not yet- conceptual sub-conscious – for want of a better, more cognitive science informed notion and explanation. These pre-conceptual or not yet visually, verbally... conceptualized inklings are explored and eventually conceptualized as concepts, meanings and ideas that constitute the collected data, the brain dump, the brain storming of the new, still to be developed theory or still to be constructed theory or model of the philosopher. Such theoretical frames of interpretation, understanding, cognition, thinking and explanation will be developed gradually during the different steps or stages of the processes of theorizing, theory-building or construction that will follow – when Kant conceptualizes his metaphysics of how we are conscious, when Hegel lays down the nature and development of history, when Marx by words fight the good fight for the working classes or Russell for the upper class, Descartes for Reason, Husserl of Ideen and so on and on…In this way the new so-called ‘paradigm’ or frame of philosophical reference and understanding are provided to conceive of reality in a new way, to constitute reality for us or our life-worlds, our universes in new, original ways and as a result we are presented with a transformed philosophical discourse, a new way to perceived philosophy, the doing of philosophy and the execution of this socio-cultural practice. 9 ** Why? But why all this? Why fabricate yet another philosophy? Why create yet another metaphysical system? Why manufacture yet another speculative ism with its own world of ideas? Because the existing paradigm, the current –isms and its ideology, the reigning, institutionalized universe of philosophical ideas, explanatory, theoretical frameworks, their implications, assumptions, ideals, objectives, values, principles and norms, are no longer satisfactory. They lack in meaning, in utility, in function, they, the intellectual reality, establishment and socio-cultural worlds and elites they represent are losing their power. And in the eyes of the thinker they and the philosophical reality (or the reality constituted by them philosophically) are no longer cognitively satisfactory, no sufficiently meaningful, relevant and explanatory. These are the reasons the thinker, creator of the new philosophical vision organizes his pre-conceptual intuitions, arrange and develop them theoretically, so as to constitute his new theoretical point of view, his new explanatory perspective to re-interpret ‘the world’, humans, their existence and their realities or reality for them in his eyes in more contemporary relevant, more meaningful, more intelligible ways. 10 See this article where I deal with details of Strawson’ s notions of speculative (revisionary) and descriptive metaphysics. https://www.academia.edu/31692986/Intra-Philosophical_Norms_and_other_Limits It is fairly easy to see why P F Strawson refers to and label traditional doing of philosophy as ‘speculative’ metaphysics. His own kind of philosophy passes his evaluation as the appropriate doing of philosophy because, according to him, what he is doing is not philosophy, or rather metaphysics, of and in the way of traditional speculative philosophizing, but a mere description type of doing it. To clarify further what he means by descriptive metaphysics and characterize it I wish to include the kind of philosophy or metaphysics that Gilbert Ryle did in his behaviorism-style as falling under the same label as that of Strawson – on which I happen to have written a master’s degree thesis. Metaphysical philosophy or the styles and way of doing philosophizing in the Philosophical Investigations (of Wittgenstein) I have referred to in the text link above as Explorative, and possible as a hard type of explorative metaphysics or doing philosophy. The reason for this hard typification of the explorative kind is that that book has a number of typical, traditional philosophical aims in mind. It for example aims at clarifying all sorts of traditional philosophical problems – by exploring, investigating or analysing them away by analysis and clarification of linguistic or conceptual practices or usages. These methods of philosophizing by concentrating on linguistic practices or malpractices and conceptual usage or misuse and abuse is of course different and has different aims and make all sorts of different assumptions than traditional metaphysical doing of philosophy. In contrast with the methods, principles, values and aims of the hard explorative metaphysics of philosophizing of the Philosophical Investigations I characterize the objectives and doing of philosophy in the Socratic method/s as a type of soft explorative ‘metaphysics’, if it is metaphysics, in the traditional sense of the term, at all. The reason for this characterization is that the dialogue-style of ‘Socrates’ concentrates on the language usage or misuse and abuse and the conceptual and semantic ideological misunderstanding and –ism influenced linguistic and conceptual practices of the participants in the dialogue. The focus is on the so-called giving birth of meaningful and appropriate usage of words, ideas and concepts and straight, non-fallacy thinking, understanding, reasoning and expression or communication. In other words it has very little to do with the exploration and solving of traditional metaphysical problems or their explicit investigation in terms of some theoretically fabricated speculative system. If this also occurs during the dialogue, the dissolution of traditional philosophical problems, then it is of merely secondary importance and even quite accidental, unintentional and almost irrelevant. At most it is just another secondary effect of clarification by means of the communicative processes of the dialogue-styles and their clarifying effects – of this kind of conceptual and linguistic clarification. This type of clarification also leads to the exploration and identification of all sorts of socio-psychological phenomena for example attitudes, values, norms, believes, world views, life-worlds, constructions of reality, assumptions and pre-suppositions. Some of these phenomena may or may not be directed relevant to philosophical subject-matter but they do play a part in the socialization, behaviour, cognition, thinking and understanding of society, communities, cultures, sub-cultures, institutions and individuals. All sorts of things concerning the participants, or rather the partner in the dialogue are being revealed and made explicit during the dialogical process. This makes explicit and enables the identification, exploration, clarification, investigation and the modification of the participants cognition, beliefs, attitudes, values, mind sets and many other social, psychological, cognitive and all sorts of other concerns and practices, for example assumptions, pre-suppositions, cognitive biases and fallacies of thinking and reasoning. With the making explicit of these variables that influence the behaviour, thinking, cognition, understanding, constitution of self and realities, by means of the so-called conceptual or linguistic midwifery or a kind of ‘philosophical investigation’ these individual, intra-individual, inter individual and inter-subjective, socio-cultural variable and factors can both be identified, modified and transformed or replace by more appropriate, rational, relevant, reasonable and meaningful ones. 11 A professor friend of mine once commented on the fact that I think, speak and write in the form of independent (and when written numbered) paragraphs (my words) – perhaps, superficially resembling the ‘style’, or presentation of the PI and that of the individual Socratic dialogues. The latter in so far as Socrates did not construct one, absolute dialogue or conversation, but he instead constituted and participated in many individual, independent, different, unconnected and/or isolated ones. The reason for this, my isolated paragraphs, my independent and numbered pieces and style and that of PI and the separate, individual dialogues of Socrates is intentional and it has a serious, if not ‘philosophical’, at least a logical purpose. The reason being that if the thoughts and exercises of the PI were divided in, consisted of and were constructed in the traditional chapters of books or chapter and book-long reasoning and arguments or argumentation, instead of the isolated, independent numbered paragraphs, or if the dialogues or conversations of Socrates consisted of one life-long, interconnected dialogue or if I were to write not in isolated, independent, numbered paragraphs, but instead think in terms of, express and write in traditional or chapter-length or book form then the present isolated paragraphs, individual Socratic dialogues or numbered sections of the PI would require some kind of artificial super-reasoning or meta- argumentation to logically, coherently, consistently and in a sound manner glue or cement the present, isolated, individual stand alone dialogues, the numbered pieces and independent items together. Enforcing such systematic super levels or structures on independent arguments so as to create the appearance of some grand coherent, consistent metaphysical system is one of the fallacies, one of the cognitive biases and mistakes in thinking of traditional metaphysics. By means of the isolated dialogues, numbered paragraphs and independent items one does not become involved in superficially constructing metaphysical super- structures, contrived sets of ideas, fake models and theoretical speculations and forced, fallacious reasoning – or argumentation that one is compelled to invent so as to fabricate artificial bridges (of ideas) to serve as cement that could glue together independent and unconnected ideas, thoughts, insights and reasoning. Why? What would the positive functions and advantages of the presentation of some superficial, seemingly coherent general metaphysical theory, all inclusive or absolute philosophical system? Would one not merely deceive oneself by and because of the lack of self meta-cognition of one’s aim to devise such an all-explanatory or all- inclusive metaphysical system? And the negative side of that would be the artificial fabrication and introduction of, unnecessary, irrelevant, meaningless, contrived reasoning and filling arguments to try and connect isolated, independent thoughts, ideas and arguments – that are meaningful in their own right. Things such as these unnecessary contrived arguments and the ideas they and their propositions consist of are unnecessary and lead to the creation of –isms, ideologies and speculative (metaphysical) ideas and systems of them. These things are the consequences of attempting to construct bridges, bridge arguments and employ ideas to develop entire, but unnecessary, coherent complex systems. 12 http://www.iep.utm.edu/con-meta/#SH1a Table of Contents Introduction Some Pre-Twentieth Century Metaphilosophy Defining Metaphilosophy Explicit and Implicit Metaphilosophy Explicit metaphilosophy is metaphilosophy pursued as a subfield of, or attendant field to, philosophy. Metaphilosophy so conceived has waxed and waned. In the early twenty-first century, it has waxed in Europe and in the Anglophone (English-speaking) world. Probable causes of the  increasing interest include Analytic philosophy having become more aware of itself as a tradition, the rise of philosophizing of a more empirical sort, and a softening of the divide between ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy. (This article will revisit all of those topics in one way or another.) However, even when waxing, metaphilosophy generates much less activity than philosophy. Certainly the philosophical scene contains few book-length pieces of metaphilosophy. Books such as Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy, Rescher’s Essay on Metaphilosophy, and What is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari – these are not the rule but the exception. There is more to metaphilosophy than explicit metaphilosophy. For there is also implicit metaphilosophy. To appreciate that point, consider, first, that philosophical positions can have metaphilosophical aspects. Many philosophical views – views about, say, knowledge, or language, or authenticity – can have implications for the task or nature of philosophy. Indeed, all philosophizing is somewhat metaphilosophical, at least in this sense: any philosophical view or orientation commits its holder to a metaphilosophy that accommodates it. Thus if one advances an ontology one must have a metaphilosophy that countenances ontology. Similarly, to adopt a method or style is to deem that approach at least passable. Moreover, a conception of the nature and point of philosophy, albeit perhaps an inchoate one, motivates and shapes much philosophy. But – and this is what allows there to be implicit metaphilosophy – sometimes none of this is emphasized, or even appreciated at all, by those who philosophize. Much of the metaphilosophy treated here is implicit, at least in the attenuated sense that its authors give philosophy much more attention than philosophy. The Classification of Metaphilosophies – and the Treatment that Follows Analytic Metaphilosophy The Analytic Pioneers: Russell, the Early Wittgenstein, and Moore Logical Positivism Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Later Wittgenstein Three Revivals Normative Philosophy including Rawls and Practical Ethics History of Philosophy Metaphysics: Strawson, Quine, Kripke iii. Metaphysics: Strawson, Quine, Kripke Positivism, the later Wittgenstein, and Ordinary Language Philosophy suppressed Analytic metaphysics. Yet it recovered, thanks especially to three figures, beginning with Peter Strawson. Strawson had his origins in the ordinary language tradition and he declares a large debt or affinity to Wittgenstein (Strawson 2003: 12). But he is indebted, also, to Kant; and, with Strawson, ordinary language philosophy became more systematic and more ambitious. However, Strawson retained an element of what one might call, in Rae Langton’s phrase, Kantian humility. In order to understand these characterizations, one needs to appreciate that which Strawson advocated under the heading of ‘descriptive metaphysics’. In turn, descriptive metaphysics is best approached via that which Strawson called ‘connective analysis’. Connective analysis seeks to elucidate concepts by discerning their interconnections, which is to say, the ways in which concepts variously imply, presuppose, and exclude one another. Strawson contrasts this ‘connective model’ with ‘the reductive or atomistic model’ that aims ‘to dismantle or reduce the concepts we examine to other and simpler concepts’ (all Strawson 1991: 21). The latter model is that of Russell, the Tractatus, and, indeed, Moore. Another way in which Strawson departs from Russell and the Tractatus, but not from Moore, lies in this: a principal method of connective analysis is ‘close examination of the actual use of words’ (Strawson 1959: 9). But when Strawson turns to ‘descriptive metaphysics’, such examination is not enough. Descriptive metaphysics is, or proceeds via, a very general form of connective analysis. The goal here is ‘to lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure’ (Strawson 1959: 9). Those most general features – our most general concepts – have a special importance. For those concepts, or at least those of them in which Strawson is most interested, are (he thinks) basic or fundamental in the following sense. They are (1) irreducible, (2) unchangeable in that they comprise ‘a massive central core of human thinking which has no history’ (1959: 10) and (3) necessary to ‘any conception of experience which we can make intelligible to ourselves’ (Strawson 1991: 26). And the structure that these concepts comprise ‘does not readily display itself on the surface of language, but lies submerged’ (1956: 9f.). Descriptive metaphysics is considerably Kantian (see Kant, metaphysics). Strawson is Kantian, too, in rejecting what he calls ‘revisionary metaphysics’. Here we have the element of Kantian ‘humility’ within Strawson’s enterprise. Descriptive metaphysics ‘is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world’, whereas revisionary metaphysics aims ‘to produce a better structure’ (Strawson 1959: 9; my stress). Strawson urges several points against revisionary metaphysics. A revisionary metaphysic is apt to be an overgeneralization of some particular aspect of our conceptual scheme and/or to be a confusion between conceptions of how things really are with some Weltanschauung. Revisionary metaphysics attempts the impossible, namely, to depart from the fundamental features of our conceptual scheme. The first point shows the influence of Wittgenstein. So does the third, although it is also (as Strawson may have recognized) somewhat Heideggerian. The second point is reminiscent of Carnap’s version of logical positivism. All this notwithstanding, and consistently enough, Strawson held that systems of revisionary metaphysics can, through the ‘partial vision’ (1959: 9) that they provide, be useful to descriptive metaphysics. Here are some worries about Strawson’s metaphilosophy. ‘[T]he conceptual system with which “we” are operating may be much more changing, relative, and culturally limited than Strawson assumes it to be’ (Burtt 1963: 35). Next: Strawson imparts very little about the method(s) of descriptive metaphysics (although one might try to discern techniques – in which imagination seems to play a central role – from his actual analyses). More serious is that Strawson imparts little by way of answer to the following questions. ‘What is a concept? How are concepts individuated? What is a conceptual scheme? How are conceptual schemes individuated? What is the relation between a language and a conceptual scheme?’ (Haack 1979: 366f.). Further: why believe that the analytic philosopher has no business providing ‘new and revealing vision[s]’ (Strawson 1992: 2)? At any rate, Strawson helped those philosophers who rejected reductive (especially Russellian and positivistic) versions of analysis but who wanted to continue to call themselves ‘analytic’. For he gave them a reasonably narrow conception of analysis to which they could adhere (Beaney 2009: section 8; compare Glock 2008: 159). Finally note that, despite his criticisms of Strawson, the contemporary philosopher Peter Hacker defends a metaphilosophy rather similar to descriptive metaphysics (Hacker 2003 and 2007). William Van Orman Quine was a second prime mover in the metaphysical revival. Quine’s metaphysics, which is revisionary in Strawson’s terms, emerged from Quine’s attack upon ‘two dogmas of modern empiricism’. Those ostensible dogmas are: (1) ‘belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths that are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths that are synthetic, or grounded in fact’; (2) ‘reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construction upon terms which refer to immediate experience’ (Quine 1980: 20). Against 1, Quine argues that every belief has some connection to experience. Against 2, he argues that the connection is never direct. For when experience clashes with some belief, which belief(s) must be changed is underdetermined. Beliefs ‘face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but as a corporate body’ (p. 41; see Evidence section 3.c.i). Quine expresses this holistic and radically empiricist conception by speaking of ‘the web of belief’. Some beliefs – those near the ‘edge of the web’ – are more exposed to experience than others; but the interlinking of beliefs is such that no belief is immune to experience. Quine saves metaphysics from positivism. More judiciously put: Quine’s conception, if correct, saves metaphysics from the verifiability criterion (q.v. section 2.b). For the notion of the web of belief implies that ontological beliefs – beliefs about ‘the most general traits of reality’ (Quine 1960: 161) – are answerable to experience. And, if that is so, then ontological beliefs differ from other beliefs only in their generality. Quine infers that, ‘Ontological questions [...] are on a par with questions of natural science’ (1980: 45). In fact, since Quine thinks that natural science, and in particular physics, is the best way of fitting our beliefs to reality, he infers that ontology should be determined by the best available comprehensive scientific theory. In that sense, metaphysics is ‘the metaphysics of science’ (Glock 2003a: 30). Is the metaphysics of science actually only science? Quine asserts that ‘it is only within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described’ (1981: 21). Yet he does leave a job for the philosopher. The philosopher is to translate the best available scientific theory into that which Quine called ‘canonical notation’, namely, ‘the language of modern logic as developed by Frege, Peirce, Russell and others’ (Orenstein 2002: 16). Moreover, the philosopher is to make the translation in such a way as to minimize the theory’s ontological commitments. Only after such a translation, which Quine calls ‘explication’ can one say, at a philosophical level: ‘that is What There Is’. (However, Quine cannot fully capitalize those letters, as it were. For he thinks that there is a pragmatic element to ontology. See section 3.a below.) This role for philosophy is a reduced one. For one thing, it deprives philosophy of something traditionally considered one of its greatest aspirations: necessary truth. On Quine’s conception, no truth can be absolutely necessary. (That holds even for the truths of Quine’s beloved logic, since they, too, fall within the web of belief.) By contrast, even Strawson and the positivists – the latter in the form of ‘analytic truth’ – had countenanced versions of necessary truth. Saul Kripke - the third important reviver of metaphysics - allows the philosopher a role that is perhaps slightly more distinct than Quine does. Kripke does that precisely by propounding a new notion of necessity. (That said, some identify Ruth Barcan Marcus as the discoverer of the necessity at issue.) According to Kripke (1980), a truth T about X is necessary just when T holds in all possible worlds that contain X. To explain: science shows us that, for example, water is composed of H20; the philosophical question is whether that truth holds of all possible worlds (all possible worlds in which water exists) and is thereby necessary. Any such science-derived necessities are aposteriori just because, and in the sense that, they are (partially) derived from science. Aposteriori necessity is a controversial idea. Kripke realizes this. But he asks why it is controversial. The notions of the apriori and aposteriori are epistemological (they are about whether or not one needs to investigate the world in order to know something), whereas – Kripke points out – his notion of necessity is ontological (that is, about whether things could be otherwise). As to how one determines whether a truth obtains in all possible worlds, Kripke’s main appeal is to the intuitions of philosophers. The next subsection somewhat scrutinizes that appeal, together with some of the other ideas of this subsection. Naturalism including Experimentalism and Its Challenge to Intuitions Kripke and especially Quine helped to create, particularly in the United States, a new orthodoxy within Analytic philosophy. That orthodoxy is naturalism or - the term used by its detractors - scientism. But naturalism (/scientism) is no one thing (Glock 2003a: 46; compare Papineau 2009). Ontological naturalism holds that the entities treated by natural science exhaust reality. Metaphilosophical naturalism – which is the focus in what follows – asserts a strong continuity between philosophy and science. A common construal of that continuity runs thus. Philosophical problems are in one way or another ‘tractable through the methods of the empirical sciences’ (Naturalism, Introduction). Now, within metaphilosophical naturalism, one can distinguish empirical philosophers from experimental philosophers (Prinz 2008). Empirical philosophers enlist science to answer, or to help answer, philosophical problems. Experimental philosophers (or ‘experimentalists’) themselves do science, or do so in collaboration with scientists. Let us start with empirical philosophy. Quine is an empirical philosopher in his approach to metaphysics and even more so in his approach to epistemology. Quine presents and urges his epistemology thus: ‘The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology?’ (Quine 1977: 75). Such naturalistic epistemology – in Quine’s own formulation, ‘naturalized epistemology’ – has been extended to moral epistemology. ‘A naturalized moral epistemology is simply a naturalized epistemology that concerns itself with moral knowledge’ (Campbell and Hunter 2000: 1). There is such a thing, too, as naturalized aesthetics: the attempt to use science to solve aesthetical problems (McMahon 2007). Other forms of empirical philosophy include neurophilosophy, which applies methods from neuroscience, and sometimes computer science, to questions in the philosophy of mind. Naturalized epistemology has been criticized for being insufficiently normative. How can descriptions of epistemic mechanisms determine license for belief? The difficulty seems especially pressing in the case of moral epistemology. Wittgenstein’s complaint against naturalistic aesthetics – a view he called ‘exceedingly stupid’ – may intend a similar point. ‘The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as to how people react’ (all Wittgenstein 1966: 17, 21). A wider disquiet about metaphilosophical naturalism is this: it presupposes a controversial view explicitly endorsed by Quine, namely that science alone provides true or good knowledge (Glock 2003a: 28, 46). For that reason and for others, some philosophers, including Wittgenstein, are suspicious even of scientifically-informed philosophy of mind. Now the experimentalists – the philosophers who actually do science – tend to use science not to propose new philosophical ideas or theories but rather to investigate existing philosophical claims. The philosophical claims at issue are based upon intuitions, intuitions being something like ‘seemings’ (inklings?) or spontaneous judgments. Sometimes philosophers have employed intuitions in support of empirical claims. For example, some ethicists have asserted, from their philosophical armchairs, that character is the most significant determinant of action. Another example: some philosophers have speculated that most people are ‘incompatibilists’ about determinism. (The claim in this second example is, though empirical, construable as a certain type of second-order intuition, namely, as a claim that is empirical, yet made from the armchair, about the intuitions that other people have.) Experimentalists have put such hunches to the test, often concluding that they are mistaken (see Levin 2009 and Levy 2009). At other times, though, the type of intuitively-based claim that experimentalists investigate is non-empirical or at least not evidently empirical. Here one finds, for instance, intuitions about what counts as knowledge, about whether some feature of something is necessary to it (recall Kripke, above), about what the best resolution of a moral dilemma is, and about whether or not we have free will. Now, experimentalists have not quite tested claims of this second sort. But they have used empirical methods in interrogating the ways in which philosophers, in considering such claims, have employed intuitions. Analytic philosophers have been wont to use their intuitions about such non-empirical matters to establish burdens of proof, to support premises, and to serve as data against which to test philosophical theories. But experimentalists have claimed to find that, at least in the case of non-philosophers, intuitions about such matters vary considerably. (See for instance Weinberg, Nichols and Stitch 2001.) So, why privilege the intuitions of some particular philosopher? Armchair philosophers have offered various responses. One is that philosophers’ intuitions diverge from ‘folk’ intuitions only in this way: the former are more considered versions of the latter (Levin 2009). But might not such considered intuitions vary among themselves? Moreover: why at all trust even considered intuitions? Why not think – with Quine (and William James, Richard Rorty, Nietzsche, and others) that intuitions are sedimentations of culturally or biologically inherited views? A traditional response to that last question (an ‘ordinary language response’ and equally, perhaps, ‘an ideal language’ response) runs as follows. Intuitions do not convey views of the world. Rather they convey an implicit knowledge of concepts or of language. A variation upon that reply gives it a more naturalistic gloss. The idea here is that (considered) intuitions, though indeed ‘synthetic’ and, as such, defeasible, represent good prima facie evidence for the philosophical views at issue, at least if those views are about the nature of concepts (see for instance Graham and Horgan 1994). Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, and Post-Analytic Philosophy Pragmatism Neopragmatism: Rorty Post-Analytic Philosophy Continental Metaphilosophy Phenomenology and Related Currents Husserl’s Phenomenology Existential Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism Critical Theory Critical Theory and the Critique of Instrumental Reason Habermas The Later Heidegger Derrida's Post-Structuralism References and Further Reading Explicit Metaphilosophy and Works about Philosophical Movements or Traditions a. Explicit Metaphilosophy and Works about Philosophical Movements or Traditions Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957) ‘Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?’ in her Human life, Action, and Ethics: Essays, pp. 161–168. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005. Edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally. Beaney, Michael (2007) ‘The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy’, in Beaney, Michael ed. The Analytic Turn. Essays in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Good on, especially, the notions of analysis in early Analytic philosophy and on the historical precedents of those notions. Beaney, Michael (2009) ‘Conceptions of Analysis in Analytic Philosophy’: Supplement to entry on ‘Analysis’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Beauchamp, Tom L. (2002) ‘Changes of Climate in the Development of Practical Ethics’, Science and Engineering Ethics 8: 131–138. Bernstein, Richard J. (2010) The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge MA and Cambridge. An account of the influence and importance of pragmatism. Chappell, Timothy (2009) ‘Ethics Beyond Moral Theory’ Philosophical Investigations 32: 3 206–243. Chase, James, and Reynolds, Jack (2010) Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy. Stocksfield: Acumen. Clarke, Stanley G. (1987) ‘Anti-Theory in Ethics’, American Philosophical Quarterly 24: 3 237–244. Deleuze, Giles, and Guattari, Félix (1994) What is Philosophy? London and New York: Verso. Trans. Graham Birchill and Hugh Tomlinson. Less of an introduction to metaphilosophy than its title might suggest. Galison, Peter (1990) ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry, 16(4[Summer]): 709–752. Glendinning, Simon (2006) The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Glock, Hans-Johann (2008) What Is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Comprehensive. Illuminating. Not introductory. Graham, George and Horgan, Terry (1994) ‘Southern Fundamentalism and the End of Philosophy’, Philosophical Issues 5: 219–247. Lazerowitz, Morris (1970) ‘A Note on “Metaphilosophy”, Metaphilosophy, 1(1): 91–91 (sic). An influential (but very short) definition of metaphilosophy. Levin, Janet (2009) ‘Experimental Philosophy’, Analysis, 69(4) 2009: 761–769. Levy, Neil (2009) ‘Empirically Informed Moral Theory: A Sketch of the Landscape’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12:3–8. McNaughton, David (2009) ‘Why Is So Much Philosophy So Tedious?’, Florida Philosophical Review IX(2): 1-13. Joll, Nicholas (2009) ‘How Should Philosophy Be Clear? Loaded Clarity, Default Clarity, and Adorno’, Telos 146 (Spring): 73–95. Joll, Nicholas (Forthcoming) Review of Jürgen Habermas et al, An Awareness of What Is Missing (Polity, 2010), Philosophy. Tries to clarify and evaluate some of Habermas' thinking on religion. Papineau, David (2009) ‘The Poverty of Analysis’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume lxxxiii: 1–30. Preston, Aaron (2007) Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion. London and New York: Continuum. Argues, controversially, that Analytic philosophy has never had any substantial philosophical or metaphilosophical unity. Prinz, Jesse J. (2008) ‘Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy’ in J. Knobe and S. Nichols (eds.) Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Urmson, J. D. (1956) Philosophical Analysis: Its Development Between the Two World Wars. London: Oxford University Press. Rescher, Nicholas (2006) Philosophical Dialectics. An Essay on Metaphilosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Centres upon the notion of philosophical progress. Contains numerous, occasionally gross typographical errors. Rorty, Richard ed. (1992) The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Second edition. A useful study of 1930s to 1960s Analytic metaphilosophy. Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, Jerome B., and Skinner, Quentin eds. (1984) Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sorell, Tom, and Rogers, C. A. J. eds. (2005) Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford. Stewart, Jon (1995) ‘Schopenhauer’s Charge and Modern Academic Philosophy: Some Problems Facing Philosophical Pedagogy’, Metaphilosophy 26(3): 270–278. Taylor, Charles (1984) ‘Philosophy and Its History’, in Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner 1984. Williams, Bernard (2003) ‘Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look’ in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James, pp. 25–37. Oxford: Blackwell. Second edition. Williamson, Timothy (2007) The Philosophy of Philosophy, Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell. A dense, rather technical work aiming to remedy what it sees as a metaphilosophical lack in Analytic philosophy. Treats, among other things, these notions: conceptual truth; intuitions; thought experiments. Analytic Philosophy including Wittgenstein, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Logical Pragmatism  Strawson, Peter (1959) Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen.  Strawson, Peter (1991) Analysis and Metaphysics. An Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Also see his “Bounds of Sense”.(on Kant) Both an introduction to philosophy and an introduction to Strawson’s own philosophical and metaphilosophical views.  Strawson, Peter (2003) ‘A Bit of Intellectual Autobiography’ in Glock ed. 2003b Pragmatism and Neopragmatism Continental Philosophy Other  Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. Routledge: London. The title means ‘schema of philosophical logic’.  Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1966) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell.  Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969) The Blue and Brown Books. Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”. Blackwell: Oxford.  Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2001) Philosophical Investigations. The German Text, with a Revised English Translation. Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Third edition. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. The major work of the ‘later’ Wittgenstein. 13 Metaphilosophy Themes and Questions A Personal List Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/meta/topics.htm I made this list of questions primarily to help students appreciate what is distinctive about the branch of philosophy we call "metaphilosophy". Students who have no trouble understanding when a question is epistemological or ethical sometimes nevertheless have great trouble deciding whether a question is metaphilosophical. I've found that no straightforward definition of metaphilosophy helps students with this task. What does help, a bit, is to see a large number of metaphilosophical questions. My secondary purpose is making this list is to help students come up with paper topics, read philosophy with attention to its implicit metaphilosophy, and sort out their own metaphilosophical thoughts. (My comments are in brackets, I think with the author and emphasize philosophically more relevant aspects, if any, that he sort of expressed or perhaps pointed to) Table of Contents Cognitivity Systematicity Methodology Historicity Self-reference and Self-application Immanence and non-immanence Disagreement and diversity Primacy of the practical Philosophy good and bad Philosophy and expertise Ends of philosophy Death of philosophy Anti-philosophies Philosophy and assertion Philosophy and exposition Philosophy and style Philosophy as literature Literature as philosophy Philosophical beauty Philosophy as science Philosophy and related fields and activities Philosophy and argument Philosophy and wisdom Philosophy and metaphilosophy Philosophy and the folk Philosophy and 'primitive' life Philosophy and philosophers Philosophy and pedagogy Cognitivity Does philosophy lead to knowledge (is it cognitive)? Can it be true or false? (NO, meaningful or meaningless; do not confuse information, data or knowledge with insights and understanding. Philosophers seek the latter, that is what philosophy is about) (Unclear what you mean by cognition, an umbrella word for many things for example: data, information, insights, understanding...) To be cognitive in this sense is to bear any truth-value, including falsehood, as opposed to bearing none at all. Don't confuse cognitivity with truth. To bear a truth-value is not necessarily to be knowable with certainty, or by any method. Don't confuse cognitivity with knowability. (a misleading, secondary path, don’t go there) The question is not whether anything is knowledge or cognitive e.g. science; but whether philosophy is (ever) knowledge. (never information, but insights, understanding) Does philosophy merely criticize or examine knowledge, (YES, philosophy not concerned with data or information for their own sake, but to reveal insights and philosophically relevant understanding) without itself being (or becoming) knowledge? If so, then why should we trust it? What warrants it? Can it be objective or corrigible? How should we evaluate it? (meta-standards for evaluating philosophy) Can philosophy be cognitive "in some sense" and non-cognitive "in another sense"? If so, try to articulate those senses. Can we say that the "highest" or "most important" philosophy is cognitive or non-cognitive? (as long as you emphasize meaning, insights and understanding and not data and information as knowledge’, that is philosophically relevant) If philosophy is non-cognitive, would it follow that we should read it non-immanently? (See section below on immanent and non-immanent readings of philosophy .) If philosophy is cognitive, (what do you mean by cognitive in this context, unclear) does the apparently permanent character of disagreement in philosophy become a sign of failure? (See the section below on disagreement and diversity.) In natural science even "negative results" are valuable. (A negative result is the failure to confirm an hypothesis.) Is there anything comparable in philosophy? What value might "mistaken"(??) philosophies have? Can only non-cognitivist metaphilosophies find value in "great mistakes"? Can non-cognitivists have any concept of philosophical error? If so, how? If not, is there a non-cognitivist equivalent? (meaning/understanding not information/knowledge) Is philosophical truth more like the truth of artworks or the truth of science? (no, neither,not truth, but meaning). Are philosophers who are committed to "reason" thereby committed to the cognitivity of philosophy? Those who are committed to "inquiry"? (irrelevant) Can philosophy be cognitive "ultimately" and non-cognitive only provisionally? Vice versa? Can you think of examples of each? (irrelevant) Do some positions make their cognitivity depend on their certainty? (Can you think of any examples?) If such positions don't quite attain the certainty they need, what is the effect of relinquishing their cognitivity? (You use science as measurement) Is philosophy non-cognitive if its point or end is non-cognitive? (See list below for some examples.) (clarify this please, you deal in misleading ways with confusing, confused notions, that could mean many things.) Or is it non-cognitive only if it refrains from claiming truth or falsehood on the way to fulfulling the point, purpose, or end of philosophy? Is philosophy non-cognitive if it is prompted, inspired, or caused by something non-epistemic, such as psychological insecurity, class struggle, will to power, or feelings of pleasure and pain? (Now you look for socio-psychological factors or causes of philosophy. Do the same for art, science and other socio-cultural or intersubjective practices!) Is all non-cognitivist philosophy fictionalist? (?) If you decide that philosophy is non-cognitive (ultimately, or in the foreground), then how do you explain the apparent fact that most (practically all) philosophers write as if philosophy were cognitive, claiming that such-and-such is true, and thus-and-so false? (Do they? Then they are misled about philosophy and its purpose – meaning, not truth) (Really? They talk about truth and false? They talk about more or less meaningful) possible explanations: They had secret doctrines, and did not publish their real views. (True for the majority?) They were self-deceived. (And we are so much wiser than they?) The way they wrote does not really imply cognitivity; truth claims, refutations, arguments, etc. are moves in the game. (Needs further explanation, justification.) Is non-cognitivism in metaphilosophy plausible only to the extent that we are already skeptical about the possibility of attaining knowledge? (NOT knowledge as data or information but meaning so as to to attain or clarify and develop insights and understanding! That is the possibility or potential of philosophy) If not, why else might it be plausible? What different ways are there to be non-cognitive and how do we decide to favor some over others? Here are some to consider: truth not propositional; philosophy propositional only as means, or only sometime (Hegel) truth only within system (meaning not truth, contexts not system only that is too large and not the only type of context), and system suspended or floating (Kant? Wittgenstein) non-cognitive point to inquiry for truth (Stoicism, pragmatism, many others) cognitive criteria ultimately subordinate to ethical or aesthetic criteria (Nietzsche) self-conscious fictionalism (Nietzsche? Vaihinger) (centrality of being meaningful/less) centrality of regulative principles philosophy as "stirring the compost" philosophy as questions, not answers (and explorations of the questions or problems) philosophy as search for comfort, solace, utility, beauty, ataraxia, salvation philosophy as literature or art philosophy as expression of personality (minor aspect) philosophy as expression of Zeitgeist, substructure, personality, etc. (ideology) (the negative aspect of it) philosophy as sheer choice (no there exist more ‘objective’ norms for philosophy) philosophy as cultural action (secondary) philosophy as liberation (in the Socratic manner, insights, understanding) philosophy as self-creation (yes, secondary and personal to the philosopher thinking the philosophy) philosophy as preparation for death philosophy as meditation (it contains contemplation or rather reflection,secondary tools) philosophy as criticism philosophy as prescription philosophy as play philosophy as worship, celebration (Plato, the good, the true etc) philosophy as therapy (for the thinker and some readers perhaps) philosophy as clarification of language philosophy as (a certain kind of) living (yes, is a total role like that of a monastic or contemplative solitary/hermit) philosophy as (seeking insights, understanding to enhance and arrive at greater insights and wisdom) wisdom philosophy as "gadflight" (linguistic/conceptual clarification – one aspect, step on the way to insights and understanding) How can we decide that some philosophy is better than others? Are non-cognitivists at a loss, or disadvantage, here? (meaningful or meaningless) See John Lange, The Cognitivity Paradox, Princeton University Press, 1970; Jacob Loewenberg, Reason and the Nature of Things: Reflections on the Cognitive Function of Philosophy, Open Court, 1959; James F. Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophical Project, SUNY Press, 1992; Joseph Wayne Smith, The Progress and Rationality of Philosophy as a Cognitive Enterprise: An Essay on Metaphilosophy, Avebury, 1988. Systematicity Should philosophy be systematic? (yes so as to be intersubjectively meaningful) What is a philosophical system? (an –ism and ideology of ideas) What virtues have been claimed for doing philosophy non-systematically or anti-systematically? (irrelevant) Why is beginning,( a course of questioning of ideas, etc) a problem for (all!! Either you have questions, insights or you don’t – inspiration, writer’s block etc) systematic philosophy? Compare a few philosophers on their actual beginnings and on their theoretical solutions to the problem of beginning. Can systems prove themselves without begging the question by taking the methods and standards of proof from within the system? (reject system and systemizing philosophy) Do systems that purport to be complete license their proponents to interpret disagreement as error? If so, is this regrettable? Do systems that purport to be complete (reject them, not within the scope of philosophy to create systems) absorb all criticism as part of the system (the "tarbaby defense"). If so, is this regrettable? Compare a few systematic philosophers on how they would respond to one who felt herself to stand outside the system. (the social system, syetm or institution of philosophy or the philosopher’s theoretical, speculative/revisionary metaphysical system?) Kant said (KdrV, B.502) that "Human reason is by nature architectonic. That is to say, it regards all our knowledge as belonging to a possible system." (reject this unfounded assumption or –ism) If Kant is right about this, does it follow that philosophy should be done systematically? Or only that reason hopes that a complete system exists in principle? Kant's quotation continues: "That is to say, it regards all our knowledge as belonging to a possible system, (no, field, domain or discourse or discipline or kind of intersubejctivity) and therefore allows only such principles as do not at any rate make it impossible for any knowledge that we may attain to combine into a system with other knowledge." In any case, is Kant right? (no) Should we decide how to do philosophy in light of the nature of reason (supposing we could know it)? (what does this mean?) Are systems demanded (by those who demand them) because the explanandum of philosophy is systematic, or because human beings have a quirky preference (such as a native architectonic or anal retentive neurosis)? (they are misled by their attitudes) Can the philosophical and metaphilosophical demands of system-building distort doctrine? (doctrine?) For example, if logic or ethics ought to say such-and-such in truth, could the problem of beginning or similar problem leads us in a different direction? (yes) Are the demands of truth and of systematic coherence compatible? Cf. Nietzsche: "I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1968; from Twilight of the Idols (original 1889), I.26 (p. 25); cf Hollingdale's comments on N's anti-systematicity in Appendix A, of this edition, pp. 188-89. See Everett W. Hall, Philosophical Systems: A Categorical Analysis, University of Chicago Press, 1960; George Lucas Jr. (ed.), Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy, SUNY Press, 1986; Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, System and History in Philosophy, SUNY Press, 1986; Jules Vuillemin, What Are Philosophical Systems?, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Methodology Are there methods peculiar to philosophy? (yes) Do we need a method to discover, examine, or justify (no explore) a method? Do we need a certified method (contextually relative standards, norms) to certify a method? If so, how do we escape this apparent dilemma of circularity and infinite regress? (explore not certify methods and their implications) How does philosophy justify its methods? (it does not, they are merely taken for granted) Do (should) we acquire a method before claiming knowledge, or after? Is knowledge certified by the method that discovered or established it, or is method certified by the knowledge it discovers or establishes? What is the relationship between method and result in philosophy? (the methods reveal the sense being argued and reasoned for) What is, and what ought to be, the role of argument in philosophy? (revealing sense, meaning) How rigid is the distinction between argument to convince and argument to prove? (rigid and obvious) Does argument have a bona fide epistemic function or is it entirely social/political? (an aspect of our intersubjective tools or means for expression, communication, etc) See section on philosophy and argument below. What are the tenable solutions, if any, to the problem of beginning? (context for this beginning please, many meanings) What is the role of criteria in philosophy? How are they discovered? Do we need criteria to validate our criteria? (intersubjective standards, norms) What are the roles of consistency,(its role is very different from the two other notions mentioned here) completeness, (meaning and functions?) and certainty (this is related to the author’s obsession, wrongly, with truth and knowledge as truth/factual truth) in philosophical writing? What is their value? What are relations among these three traditional desiderata? (are they THE desiderata?) Is it true (according to Descartes) that all differences of result among philosophers may be traced to differences of method? (method in context, relevant method to the questions being explored0 method is only one aspects of the processes of the different stages of philosophical thinking and theorizing) What's wrong with being unmethodical? (what is expressed will not make sense or be meaningful) Why is philosophy more conscious of its methods than the sciences? (is it?) Historicity Is a philosophy determined, or limited, by conditions in the philosopher's time and place? (yes, socio-cultural, institutional and other factors) Are some philosophies impossible to understand from certain other historical positions? (we read ‘across’ or beyond/passed those factors) For a given philosopher who claims eternal truth for her conclusions, (what and how would this be? Deal in meaningfulness not truths) how does she claim to have transcended history, and how does she explain her own historicity? For a given philosopher who disclaims eternal truths and asserts that all assertions are historically situated, how does she cope with the apparent self-refutation of her position? (circular fallacy – there are more universal and less socio-cultural, historically determined contexts, eg as in mathematics 1+1=2, ) Is the history of philosophy the history of error? (partly not absolute) What is the relation between the substance of a philosophy and its 'place' in the history of philosophy? (relevant to certain aspects only – too general a statemenat) What is the relation between philosophy itself and the history of philosophy? How does this relation differ from those between mathematics, chemistry, literature, or religion and their histories? (the other disciplines create the history and develop beyond the past, philosophy repeats ‘the same’ questions and b=never goes beyond its history of past – juts implodes it repeatedly – something like the big-bang, the same thing just implded repeatedly) If "philosophy is the history of philosophy" (Hegel), then are all philosophical claims historically conditioned and liable to reevaluation (including this one, only in one sense)? Can philosophy progress? If so, has it actually progressed? (irrelevant) Can philosophy regress? Can you cite any examples? (irrelevant terms in this context progress and regress) Compare the values of writing the history of philosophy immanently and non-immanently. (?) What metaphilosophical questions are typically answered (at least by display) in writing the history of philosophy? (subject-matter and methods) How have philosophers used the history of philosophy for non-historical or doctrinal purposes? (Marx and his followers, Habermas, etc) See Aristotle's historical remarks at the beginning of the Metaphysics. Can bad history make good philosophy? (See e.g. Russell and Heidegger on the pre-Socratics.) (irrelevant, not directly related, intervening, intermediate factors involved) How do philosophers typically use their predecessors? How should they? (insights and tools or data collection to develop their own theorizing) what would you think of a philosopher who had read virtually none of his predecessors? (See. e.g. Herbert Spencer.) (meaningful to certain thinkers and personalities, as in art a painter who does or does not take notice of other painters) Hobbes said that if he wasted his time reading the books of his predecessors, then he'd never know more than they did. (meaningful) Would you expect such philosophers to ask different kinds of questions and come to different kinds of results? If so, try to describe the difference. (no, not really – put in context and show the philosopher and specific points) In what ways have the questions of philosophy changed and stayed the same from the Greeks to the 20th century? (specify, some questions changed, new ones introduced and other not) Is any view of the history or historicity of philosophy displayed by philosophies that claim to be "philosophies of the future"(meanings?) rather than of the present or past? Cf. Feuerbach, Nietzsche. Why, and how, would a philosopher seek to "overcome" the history of philosophy? (impossible, contextual, situated) Is a "merely antiquarian" interest in the history of philosophy unphilosophical? (yes) Is it legitimate (?) to take philosophical questions from one period and look for answers in philosophers of another period? (Philosophers do that all the time – as in a sense philosophy deals with ‘the same’ problems, expressed in different words and perceived in different ways) What has happened when a philosophical question is no longer asked, or is greatly reduced in urgency or centrality? (Can you think of examples?) (fashion, fads of the time) What has happened when a position or answer is passed by without being refuted? (fashion) Can Kant be right when he says that he understands Plato better than Plato understood himself? (First Critique, B.370; cf B.862.) (in hindsight) Can Fichte be right when he makes the same claim about Kant? Can Husserl be right when he says that we understand all previous philosophers better than they understood themselves? (Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, Northwestern UP, 1970, at 73.) (YES, because we view them in a larger context, big pictue, with distance in hindsight) What is historical distance such that this kind of understanding becomes possible? (placing the ideas in context by removing contemporary features and concerns that are irrelevant) Can you recognize the historical strata in the list of questions, for example, in this hand-out? See: Darrel E. Christensen, "Philosophy and Its History," Review of Metaphysics, 18 (1960) 58-83; Dauenhauer, Bernard P. (ed.), At the Nexus of Philosophy and History, University of Georgia Press, 1987; W.B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, Schocken, 2d ed., 1968; Jorge J.E. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography, SUNY, 1991; Peter Hare (ed.), Doing Philosophy Historically, Prometheus Books, 1996; Frank E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History, Stanford University Press, 1965; Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, System and History in Philosophy, SUNY Press, 1986; Richard Rorty et al. (eds.), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1984; V. Tejera and Thelma Lavine (eds.), History and Anti-History in Philosophy, Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1989; Craig Walton, "Bibliography of the Historiography and Philosophy of the History of Philosophy," International Studies in Philosophy, 9 (1977); reprinted Torino: Filosofia, n.d. Self-Reference and Self-Application Are a given philosopher's criteria of truth (knowledge, meaning) true (knowable, meaningful) by their own terms? Must they be? (there will always be an element of this in philosophy, try to be aware of them, identify them and explore their implications; part of cognitive bias leading to creation and employment of fallacies in thinking) Is self-referential inconsistency as objectionable as other kinds of inconsistency? (unavoidable but be aware of them as one kind of cognitive bias) Many philosophies have implications for the nature or use of argument, proof, language, method, and philosophy itself. Must philosophies always comply with their own strictures on these subjects, or can they work at a 'different level' and exempt themselves? (if possible they will, but the suggestions will be coloured by cognitive bias and even fallacies) Are there interesting or significant philosophical positions that cannot be expounded except with some self-referential problem or paradox? Can you think of examples? (yes there will be) Compare the metaphilosophies of a few philosophers on their self-referential consistency. Some scholars have distinguished philosophical reasoning from formal logical reasoning (and scientific and legal reasoning), and found that some self-referential methods are peculiar to philosophy. What uses of self-reference are peculiar to philosophical reasoning? Find examples of self-justification and self-refutation. Does the search for first principles, or presuppositions, (explore them, identify them and make them explicit) – part of the process of theorizing) require frequent encounters with vicious and benign self-reference? For a given work, what is the effect of doctrine (if any meaning please?) on the genre of its exposition, type of discourse, or use of language? on its mode of assertion, type of confidence or certainty claimed? Many philosophers use reason to limit or subvert reason (see e.g. Sextus Empiricus, Hume, and Kant). If this is paradoxical at first sight, what does it show in the last analysis about the nature (no THE nature, one possible aspect of its use and application)of reason, philosophy, and method? How should we judge philosophies which (as most do) instruct us how to judge? If we cannot 'get outside' philosophy to judge philosophies, should we regret or rejoice? (that must be accepted and used explicitly as as one aspect of the philosophical discourse, discipline and socio-cultural practice) What does it show about the cognitivity ( please specify too vague) of philosophy? Why (many reasons, motives, cultural, social, personal, etc) does a given philosopher practice philosophy and write books? Is her book consistent with this vision of the nature and function of philosophy? Can the doctrinal aspect of a philosophy be consistent with all its other aspects? What is the price of trying? of failing? (please specify too general) See: Steven J. Bartlett and Peter Suber, Self-Reference: Reflections on Reflexivity, Martinus Nijhoff, 1987 (contains a large bibliography). Immanence and Non-Immanence Should philosophy be explained as the intellectual (meaning?) response to philosophical questions, arguments, living problems, and prior philosophers? (These would be immanent INTERNAL to doing philosophy, explanations.) Should philosophy instead be explained as the upshot, byproduct, epiphenomenon, or side-effect of something else, such as economic or political forces, class struggle, will to power, individual psychology, cultural determinism, or linguistic confusion? (These would be non-immanent or reductive explanations; they are sometimes called "external critique".) (both immanent EXTERNAL FACTORS INVOLVED) If you prefer an immanent explanation, how do you explain the role of the historical and psychological conditions of the philosopher in the development of her philosophy? Does philosophy reflect the material conditions of its time and place at all? (yes as some factors and variables, but certain insights are more universal and eternal transcending personal, social, cultural, historical conditions and factors) If you prefer a non-immanent explanation, 'ultimately', then is your favored explanation subject to philosophical criticism? (YES, but you do not FAVOR it, that is one aspects to be explore, external factors must also be explored and considered) If so, what is the effect of this circle on the strength of your explanation? How far can the two types of explanation of philosophy work together? Is it consistent to interpret the same philosopher or text as having reasons (immanent) and causes (non-immanent), or does the latter undercut the former? (YES, obviously) Can non-immanent analysis of a philosophy avoid "reduction"? (specify) What is reduction? If it is objectionable, why is it objectionable? What metaphilosophy is displayed by the view that it is objectionable? For a given philosopher, ask whether she wants to be examined solely on the basis of the arguments and conclusions in her book? Even if so, what might be useful for us, qua philosophers, to learn about the philosopher's (or philosophy's) psychological, political, economic, or historical background and circumstances? ( like certain types of literature criticism and French philosophical approaches) For a given philosopher, ask whether her important theses arose, or are presented as if they arose, entirely from thinking about issues and examining arguments? (good exercise) What of philosophical interest might be (in Wittgenstein's terms) displayed but not depicted (ineffable, concepts and ideas do, not yet, exist or are not yet available, to express those intuitions, notions, ideas) by a work of philosophy? Is it necessary, or artificial, to distinguish the grounds of a theory according to the author (the immanent argument) from the causes of the theory according to the reader (the non-immanent explanation)? If they are distinct, which is more essential in understanding the nature of a philosophy? (this varies with philosophical systems, if necessary use or explore both) Marxists hold that immanent histories of philosophy presuppose idealism. Is this true? (no, MarxISM suggests this bias) Conversely, is it true that idealist histories must be immanent histories? (no nothing to do with each other, many intervening variables) Must materialist histories be non-immanent? (no, no direct cause or effect, intermediate variables) Must non-immanent histories or analyses be materialist? (too general as statement or notion) If Marx is right, would it follow that teaching philosophy to emphasizing the immanent arguments would presuppose idealism? (too general a notion) What are the social and political conditions (specify, too general) that define philosophers and philosophy? Does identifying them help solve or dissolve any philosophical problems? (it might or might not assist in it, please specify, too general, vague and abstract) Is immanent philosophy bad faith? "Just academic"? If philosophy must address one's situation to be authentic, how far can it then address the tradition and continue the immanent dialogue of the tradition? (too general, specify) Can philosophy be done non-immanently, or only viewed non-immanently? (too general) Disagreement and Diversity Why have philosophers not agreed as often as scientists? (too general) Have philosophers agreed more than at first appears? Less? (too general) Can the apparent disagreement be reinterpreted as misunderstanding? as development? (give specific cases, too general and meaningless) What may, and may not, legitimately be inferred from the spectacle of disagreement in philosophy? Why? (specific cases, too general) For example, does it follow that at least half the positions are in error? that we should be relativists? that we should be skeptics? that certainty is unattainable? that philosophy is non-cognitive? that philosophy is dialectical? that truth is contradictory? that philosophy is not a science? that philosophers are narcissists? that future work is necessary? that future work is pointless? something else? If philosophy is cognitive (this author employs the word ‘cognitive’ in many different way and contexts. This is misleading and confusing. For example one is unsure what exactly he means, from several different possible meanings, when he employs this notion. Often it is unclear what exactly he means, which meaning or meanings of ‘cognitive’, and he frequently conflates several different meanings of this umbrella-notion. It could refer to: of or relating to the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasted with emotional and volitional processes. www.dictionary.com/browse/cognitive), then is the spectacle of disagreement a sign of failure? (too general, specify) Similarly, if one takes the spectacle of disagreement to be a sign of health, then is one thereby displaying one's view that philosophy is non-cognitive? (too general and speculation) Is the apparently permanent character of philosophical disagreement of philosophers a sign of success or failure? (Both? Neither?) (too general, speculative) How can we conceive "success" (or health) such that philosophy is successful (or healthy) despite the perennial disagreement? (too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions) Can philosophy be a "practical" success and a "speculative" failure? Can philosophy be functional for good in its culture and for its individual practitioners (even if its theories are false or uncertain)? Can philosophy show the connections among ideas, so that we understand the issues better and better (even if its theories are false or uncertain)? Can philosophy provide tools for understanding (even if its theories are false or uncertain)? How much of the historical disagreement in philosophy can be attributed to: ((too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions) the fact that philosophers are asking different questions? the fact that individual philosophers differ from each other in some combination of race, class, gender, personality, language, century, and culture? exaggerated or polarized statements that describe different but largely compatible philosophies? misunderstanding? What does it mean that philosophers disagree even about the significance of disagreement? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions) Is disagreement in and of itself a ground of doubt? Does disagreement prevent certainty? If so, is certainty impossible? Do any philosophers take disagreement into account in "setting" the "assertiveness level" of their assertions? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, for all of these) Is disagreement a sufficient sign of uncertainty, obliging us to doubt or hesitate, or is it compatible with certainty (i.e. if all but one are simply wrong)? If disagreement is taken as a sufficient sign of uncertainty, and if one of the positions fighting for recognition in the choir of disagreement is actually true, then we will miss our chance to affirm truth waiting for the disagreement to disappear. If this is so, are we stupid, or is this tragic? If epistemology converts the search for truth into the search for certainty (Suber),(No not truh, but meaning) then does it thereby convert it to the search for agreement as well? If epistemology (through questions like "how do you know?") does not do this, are there other forces? (factors?) that do? If so, what are they? Are some philosophical disagreements "incommensurable"? If so, how are they adjudicated, if at all? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions) What about disagreements about the true logic, the concept of judgment, the function of disagreement, or other parameters of debate and adjudication itself? What about disagreements on the nature or place of incommensurability? If you incline to an Hegelian or developmental view of disagreement, how do you explain the fact that a very large majority of philosophers think they are giving the truth once and for all? Are they all self-deceived? (misled by truth, should be meaning) If so, how can this be explained? Or is it not in fact true that most philosophers think they are giving the truth once and for all? If two positions are not really contradictory, but appear to be so, they may be reconciled at the immanent level. But all philosophies may be reconciled at a non-immanent level, even if they really contradict one another. One non-immanent reconciliation is to regard the positions as stages in the unfolding of truth. What are the dangers, and glories, of non-immanent reconciliations? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions) Is agreement a goal of philosophy? Would agreement be a sign of the success of philosophy? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions) If agreements can be false or ideological, then what is the value of agreement as a goal for philosophy? Is agreement a more reasonable goal for philosophy if we mean agreement in Habermas' ideal speech situation? From Charles Peirce: Is agreement (ultimate unanimity of all reasonable inquirers) a criterion of truth? If you are inclined to say no, do your criteria ultimately reduce to this one? Do your criteria either use agreement as a sign of truth, or imply that agreement is desirable? Does one philosophy imply that all other, disagreeing philosophies are wrong?(no less meaningful) Do all philosophies have a (tacit or explicit) "exclusivity clause"? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions) Find philosophies that do and that do not take this position. What are their various views of disagreement? of logic? of debate? of error? of corrigibility? For a philosophy without an exclusivity clause, explore the question whether that philosophy and its attitude toward disagreement are self-subverting or self-justifying. Can cognitive philosophies not have an exclusivity clause? Can coherent philosophies? Can the attempt to rid oneself of an exclusivity clause depend on the use of one? Can a philosophy be refuted for relying on a metaphilosophy belied by the fact of disagreement? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) If disagreement can damage (some) philosophical positions, then would it matter if all human beings agreed on everything starting tomorrow? Or would the rich history of past disagreement suffice to cause whatever damage disagreement could cause? Is there any place in philosophy for the argument from consensus gentium? If it has even a limited role, what is it? In the second Critique Kant said that the distinction between contingent unanimity and necessary universality is essential to ethics. Is it essential to philosophy or metaphilosophy? Is disagreement symmetrical? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Fichte said he agreed with Kant on the theory of freedom; before he died, Kant said he disagreed with Fichte on the theory of freedom. H.L.A. Hart and Hans Kelsen also disagree on whether they disagree (Hart thinks they agree on some points, Kelsen doesn't). What is happening when disagreement appears to be asymmetrical? What is the relation between a philosopher's attitude toward disagreement and diversity, and her theory of error? Must philosophers apply their theories of error to all philosophers who disagree? If not, when and why not? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Why is it so very rare to read words to the effect, "I am right, everyone else is wrong, and I can prove it..."? Do philosophers commonly have this attitude but timidly or courteously refrain from voicing it? Or do they have this attitude only rarely? How should a philosopher regard the critics and dissenters who do not agree with her? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Compare a few philosophers on how they actually regard critics and dissenters (e.g. as mistaken, underdeveloped, self-deceived, blameworthy, stubborn, pitiable, unintelligent, uninspired, unfortunately born in wrong sex, culture, or century, true in the untrue form,...). What is displayed about one's metaphilosophy, and about one's epistemology and ethics, by how one regards critics and dissenters? What features of a philosophy and a metaphilosophy permit one to use the "tarbaby defense", that is, to embrace and envelope all critics and dissenters, saying they are explained by the system and even confirm the truth of the system? Are these features objectionable in themselves, or desirable? See Frank Brown Dilley, "The Nature of Philosophical Disagreement," in his Metaphysics and Religious Language, Columbia University Press, 1964; Frank Brown Dilley, "Why Do Philosophers Disagree?" Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1969) 217-28; Henry Alonzo Myers, Systematic Pluralism, Cornell University Press, 1961; George Kimball Plochmann, "Metaphysical Truth and the Diversity of Systems," Review of Metaphysics, 15 (Oct. 1959-Jan. 1960) 51-66; Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985; Wilmon Henry Sheldon, Strife of Systems and Productive Duality, Harvard University Press, 1918; Joseph Wayne Smith, "Against Orientational Pluralism in Metaphilosophy," Metaphilosophy, 16, 2-3 (April-July, 1985) 214-20 (against Rescher). Primacy of the Practical Is 'the practical' (the ethical) primary in philosophy? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Do we do non-ethical philosophy ultimately for the sake of ethics, and all philosophy ultimately for the sake of action or living? Is philosophy essentially a kind of inquiry? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) (One aspect of it) Is philosophy essentially a kind of action or life? (One aspect of it) What is the relation between 'the speculative' and 'the practical' in philosophy? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Do we hold one philosophy rather than another solely by virtue of intellectual criteria or at least partially by sheer choices? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Explore what Fichte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre have said on this question. Is it legitimate to judge (say )(evaluate?) epistemological doctrines by their implications for ethics? Is it legitimate to judge (say) ethical doctrines by their implications for epistemology? What kind of philosophy should we do if we hold that ethics is morally prior to everything, but that some kinds of knowledge are temporally prior to ethics? If good action requires true belief, how do we cope with the difficulty of attaining true belief? That is, how do we act ethically while undertaking the philosophical (scientific, quotidian...) labor of attaining true belief? Should we settle for approximations and fictionalist shortcuts (as in Descartes' provisional morality), or should we spend all the time it takes to "do epistemology right", letting our duties suffer in the meantime? Can philosophy be dangerous? If so, what are your models of safety and danger? What is the relation between truth and safety? What are the dangers of philosophy? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Hume said (Treatise at p. 272) that errors in religion are dangerous while those in philosophy are only ridiculous. Are there no dangerous errors in philosophy? (If so, why?) Can philosophy be useful for social or political ends? (might be as Marxism, but not its main purpose) if so, how and which ends? If so, is service (no, minor function) toward those ends the "point" of philosophy? If not (if philosophy is not useful for social and political ends), is that a criticism? Hegel believes that philosophy cannot give moral or political advice, (can be interpreted as such, but not the main function = which is to clarify meaning) since it always comes on the scene too late (spreading its wings only with the falling of the dusk). If true, would this rule out the primacy of the practical for philosophy? (What does Hegel himself say?) What does it reveal about the nature of philosophy that the life of Socrates, far more than his views, has been cherished and influential for two millenia? (nothing) Studying the meaning of the word "of" is apt to affect one's life less than studying the concept of freedom.? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Is it fair to judge the merits of a philosophy, or character of a philosopher, by the degree of integration of the philosophy in the life of the philosopher? (no) Are there different answers to the questions, (1) how did philosophy arise, and (2) why should one study philosophy? For example, did philosophy arise for epistemological reasons, to render our beliefs coherent, or for metaphysical reasons, to understand what was going on, whereas (perhaps) one ought to study philosophy for moral reasons? (YES, but specify) Let us say that "primary" philosophy tries to answer the important questions that actually arise in life, (NOT SO) and that "secondary" philosophy tries to answer the questions that arise in doing primary (and secondary) philosophy. Secondary philosophy may address questions of methodology or systematicity, consistency, try to head off paradoxes of self-reference, and so on. If we grant primacy to the practical, what is the value of secondary philosophy? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Should we avoid it? Do it quickly and get back to primary philosophy? Spend as long as we must at it in order to be sure that our primary philosophy is well-founded, even if we spend most of our lives at it? Should we expect the study of philosophy to help us decide in specific cases how to act? (NO) Are philosophers moral experts? Are moral experts (if any) philosophers? (NO) Should we expect the study of philosophy to make us better people? (NO) ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) If so, exactly how? If not, then what is the value of studying philosophy? (NONE, merely secondary) What does a philosopher expect from a good reader? (nothing, remain open minded and discover this as you go along) Scholarship and understanding? Or some more authentic reflection or action? Does it depend on the philosopher or work? Identify a philosopher who expected the latter. How effective was his/her book in eliciting or inviting that reflection or action? Philosophy good and bad How do we distinguish good (meaningful) or great philosophy from lesser philosophy? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) How have philosophers done it? Do our criteria come from the philosophies we are judging to be good or great? (What are the paradoxes of saying yes, or no, here?) Is it an objection to some non-immanent readings of philosophy that they ignore excellence and look at all works, good and bad, as equally representative of a certain underlying cause, or as symptoms of some syndrome? Is the evaluation of philosophy, as Northrop Frye says of literature, much less important than its interpretation? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Is there a dimension of quality in philosophy beyond its truth or plausibility? Can true philosophy be badly done, or false philosophy well done? If so, what kind of quality is this and what are its criteria? (not true or false, meaningful/less) Call this dimension of quality the "craft" dimension. Can attention to craft ever distort doctrine, (much of contemporary, academic, professional suffers from this, especially the Anglophone varieties) or suggest paths that 'pure' epistemology, metaphysics, or ethics (etc.) would not have suggested? See also section on philosophical beauty, below. Philosophy and expertise What talents or skills are required for "good" philosophizing? (meaningful, identify cognitive biases, fallacies, good, sound reasoning and arguments and clear, use of concepts and other cognitive features and deal with philosophizing as if doing through the different steps and stages of theorizing, producing approximate, to be modified, insights) Is familiarity with the history of philosophy required? (in some cases, too vague, specify) Is mastery of formal logic (or argumentation more loosely) required? (NO!!!) Is skill at exegesis required? (partly) Is acquaintance with the other arts and sciences, including history, required? (only partly) Is wide experience, or "life", required? (partly) Can philosophy be "expertly" done and remain exoteric? (meaning?) If one denies that there is a special kind of expertise for philosophy, is one thereby committed to relativism? (no, specify the expertise and relativism) Cf. Hegel on the foot as standard of shoemaking, reason as the standard of philosophizing; not all who have feet are expert cobblers; not all who have reason are expert philosophers; Lesser Logic, 5; Phenomenology, 67. (specify) What else is required beyond "reason"? (many things!!!) Cf. Kant on the "genteel tone" that had recently arisen in philosophy. Cf. C.E.M. Joad on "Bunkumismus"; there are no "stigmata of competency" in philosophy; Return to Philosophy, Dutton, 1936, p. 36; also see 23-24, 35-37. Ends of philosophy Do we, or should we, do "philosophy for philosophy's sake"? (yes, secondary functions will appear by themselves if the philosophizing is meaningful) If so, what becomes of the pursuits of truth, justice, and good life? If not, what is the purpose of philosophy? Is there a single "point" to the practice of philosophy? (no, specify) Or could it be a mixture of (add your own...) moral improvement, inquiry for truth, solace, salvation, diversion, celebration, puzzle-solving, aesthetic enjoyment, worship, zestful living, and wonder? In what sense are the ends of philosophy therapeutic for the philosopher and for the readers? (clarification in Socratic ways) In its ends or goals, is philosophy closer to art, religion, or the sciences? (NONE) Are the ends of philosophy yet to be achieved? (NO and it never will as there are none) Or are they constantly achieved and/or by their nature in need of continual pursuit and accomplishment? If philosophy is worth doing, is it worth doing forever? Or is it worth doing only until it is "finished" (whatever that would be)? (meaningless questions, not about these things, issues, at all) If the chase is worth more than the capture, would it ever make sense (or ever make good philosophy) to forgo the capture when it was within reach in order to continue the chase? If we translate this out of metaphor, what are we talking about? Lessing: if God had truth in one hand and pursuit of truth in the other, he'd choose the second. Wittgenstein: let the fly out of the fly bottle; get to the point where you can stop doing philosophy. (stop doing philosophy in that specific case, problem, context, but always other contexts, problems to be clarified remains) What would lead a philosopher to expound a position and then at the end to abandon it, (too general specify) or in the metaphor of Sextus Empiricus made famous by Wittgenstein, to kick down the ladder after climbing up it? Compare this self-cancellation in Sextus Empiricus, Hume, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Feyerabend. Feuerbach and Wittgenstein (among others) want to stop doing philosophy. What would justify stopping? (something personal and perhaps socio-cultural factors, like someone stops doing science, painting etc) Wittgenstein and some other analytic philosophers believe that (good) philosophy "leaves everything the way it was". (no makes explicit misleading uses and their associated attitudes, etc) Describe a perspective that would make this a virtue, and another that would make it a vice. What is certainty? Does philosophy seek or need certainty? (no) Is the conquest of doubt overrated (YES) in importance by the tradition? What important ends require it? Marx protested that previously philosophers merely tried to interpret the world, but that the point is to change it. Which pre-Marxian philosophers deserve this criticism? How would some reply to Marx? (ideology, false, meaningless generalization) If a philosophy makes the philosopher miserable, is it thereby failing to achieve the ends of philosophy? ( is part of the process of making problems explicit, by intuition and conceptualization, when the problem has been conceptualized the feeling miserable, as in the case of painting, temporarily stops) See James F. Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophical Project, SUNY Press, 1992; Harry Redner, The Ends of Philosophy: An Essay in the Sociology of Philosophy and Rationality, Rowman and Allanheld, 1986; Death of philosophy Why have analytic philosophers claimed that philosophy is or ought to be finished? (as all philosophy has and are in the process of disappearing, usurped by other discourses, and philosophical methods are abused for mere academic, professional concerns – those are not the purpose of philosophy) Why have continental philosophers? (see above) What is philosophy such that it might well be finished? What is it such that it is clearly still alive? (see above) Are there good philosophical reasons for wanting to cease doing philosophy, or to abolish it? (see above. I wrote many articles and books on this see Academic.Edu for my work for FREE) See Kenneth Baynes et al (eds.), After Philosophy: End or Transformation? MIT Press, 1987; Daniel Brudney, Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1998; Ian Hacking, "Is the End in Sight for Epistemology?" Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1980) 579-88; Jaegwon Kim, "Rorty on the Possibility of Philosophy," Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1980) 588-97; Kai Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy, Westview Press, 1991; Quentin Skinner, "The End of Philosophy," New York Times Review of Books, 23, 4 (March 19, 1981) 46-48; Peter Suber, "Is Philosophy Dead?" Earlhamite, 112, 2 (Winter 1993) 12-14; Meredith Williams, "Transcendence and Return: The Overcoming of Philosophy in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein," International Philosophical Quarterly, 28, 4 (December 1988). Anti-philosophies Are there positions or theories that, if true or justified, would make most or all philosophy nugatory? (YES, see my comments above about subject-matter, abuses and misues of methods and my articles at Academic. Edu) Consider the claims of the following in this light: the ancient Greek skeptics Marxists on ideology some existentialists on the role and absurdity of choice American pragmatists radical empiricists naive realists some natural scientists on the exclusivity of sound method religious fundamentalists on faith those believing that thinking is a disease anti-intellectuals (even intellectual anti-intellectuals) How does, and how should, philosophy evaluate these claims? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Philosophy and assertion Do all philosophies "take positions" or "make assertions"? (YES, but that says something about cognitive bias as a factor in philosophizing but is not essential to philosophizing) If not, what have some philosophies done in place of these? (try to identify cognitive bias and fallacies in thinking and other assumptions made explicit) Why couldn't Plato (or Nietzsche...) just state his assertions and argue them? If we translated Plato (or Nietzsche...) into a "handbook" of their assertions and arguments, what would be lost except for "rhetorical color"? (if they knew them they would, but they do not know all of them beforehand, they appear during their thinking and writing…) What of philosophical significance have philosophies done in addition to taking positions or making assertions? (clarify meaning and making explicit associated biases, attitudes, etc) What are we missing if we read works of philosophy only for their assertions? (too vague and general, speficy) What modes of assertion have philosophers used? (the things mentions here are merely aspects or features of theorizing, the philosophers deal with only certain, selected steps, stages and contexts of theorizing and should deal with the entire process and all steps and stages) hypothesis (Fichte's idealism? Leibniz on non-contradiction?) faith reason: proved, non-hypothetical (Kant's apodeictic certainty) subjunctive mood (some Kierkegaard) moral certainty (Kant on god, freedom, and immortality) non-assertion (Greek skeptics' "aphasia") sheer assertion, as in some aphorists and some existentialists; essentially without argument non-cognitive: sheer choice cognitive: sheer dogmatism presuming on readers' agreement or introspective certification (much of Locke) questioning, not (or more than) answering doubting, not (or more than) affirming "my view from here now" "view from nowhere" (Thomas Nagel) as reflection of Zeitgeist, personality etc. mischievous, misleading instrumental to see truth (Hegel? Wittgenstein?) important to be misunderstood in certain way (Kierkegaard? Nietzsche?) concealment of secret doctrine (Plato? Descartes?) Skeptics challenge the right of anyone to make assertions. What is the value of a philosophy that does not meet the skeptical challenge explicitly and successfully? (too vague, specify) Does assertion per se presuppose finality, objectivity, exclusivity, or cognitivity? (too vague and general) If not, what "logical space" is left open by assertion? If so, how can a philosopher who wishes to deny philosophy one of these things (finality, objectivity, exclusivity, objectivity) expound her position without self-referential inconsistency? What would be the point of making and revoking philosophical assertions in the same work? (too vague, look at the specific caes in detail) See Wittgenstein's proposition 6.54 in the Tractatus and its antecedents in Sextus Empiricus (Outlines of Pyrrhonism) and Kierkegaard (Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Philosophy and exposition What is the relation between the substance of a doctrine and the genre in which it is presented (dialogue, treatise, system, essay, aphorism, private journal, novel, poem...)? (too vague, specify) Do different genres communicate in different ways such that some are inappropriate for philosophy or for particular philosophical positions? (yes, but specify) Are there philosophical positions that can only or that can best be expounded in the genres of literature? (too general) What is the relation between the order in which a position is expounded and the logical order of inference? (too general) Compare a few philosophers on what guides the expositional order. Compare and contrast the orders of proof, time, exposition, and discovery. (place these in the contexts of the different steps and stages of theorizing and it will be clarified and made meaningful) How do they interact in works of philosophy? (see previous comment) Why do philosophers write books? Compare the motivations of a few philosophers. ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following)(Many personal and socio-cultural reasons, in my case aspects of both sets of factors, especially personal, my personality-type, but also socialization and cultural – the discourse has been made available to me by my socialization) What implications can a doctrine have for the legitimate motives for promulgating it? Discuss a few cases. (?) Contrast, where you can, the motives for writing books that are found in biographical research with the motives that follow from the doctrine immanently. Can you find a case where these two motives are inconsistent? Can a doctrine imply that its promulgation is unimportant, or even unwise? Can you think of any examples? (?) Can exposition per se distort or belie the substance of a philosophy? Can you think of examples? (?) Are there any serious philosophical positions that would be falsified or undermined by the existence of an exposition of them? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Why would a philosopher write a work with the intention of being difficult to understand, or of being misunderstood by some? (many reasons) See Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part 6; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §§ 190, 371, 381; Beyond Good and Evil, §§27, 43; Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. How should we read such texts? Do we (1) work very hard and crack the code or (2) 'respect' the intention to hide or to mislead, and take the work at face value? To what extent are philosophers responsible for the use or misuse of their work? Discuss the case of one or two philosophers (e.g. Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche were all used by Nazi scholars to justify the Nazi program). (no they are not responsible, like art – ab/used by others for their own motives and –isms) Is exposition essential to philosophy? What is lost if philosophy is done silently? (nothing, merely not intersubjectively shared) Do philosophers have any kind of obligation to publish their thoughts, enter dialogue, respond to critics, or enlighten the rest of us? (NO NO NO) If so, is there a correlative obligation to expound clearly? non-fictionally? systematically? (NO) Is philosophy inherently a public or social enterprise? a dialogue or conversation? (a bit of all these and other factors) What is the relation between utterance and contemplation? (?? Meaning) Is argument essential to philosophy or only to its public exposition and audience (or both or neither)? (essential aspect of the process of philosophical theorizing) Philosophy and style What is the relation between the substance of a doctrine and the style in which it is written? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Are style and substance inseparable? Or can every substance (doctrine, position) be expressed in other styles? (YES) Does style itself convey substance? Why would a philosopher ever use irony? (several reasons) Find a few philosophies that have implications for the use of language and compare them on the relation between their style and content. How well did their own writing live up to, abide by, or embody their views? See e.g. Aristotle on systematic equivocation; Locke on general terms; Kant on definition (or examples, or prosaic language); Hegel on picture-language; (tools in stages of theorizing) Compare a philosopher's metaphorical and non-metaphorical expressions for their contribution to the vision and integration in the position. (use of metaphors in theorizing, I wrote on this) Arthur Lovejoy said of William James that he wrote so well that it is difficult to know what he was saying or whether it is true. Should philosophers, like scientists and jurists, adopt dry styles that create no risk of persuasion beyond the evidence? (no!) See F.C.S. Schiller, "Must Philosophy be Dull?" (in his Our Human Truths) Margaret Wiley said of Spenser and Emerson that they adopted paradox as a style in order to avoid the risk of oversimplification. (pointless generalization says nothing) Are there other "logically objectionable" tropes that might have higher rhetorical justifications in philosophy? (meaning?) Some have suggested that opacity is a philosophical style, adopted in order to mystify and avoid the burden of precision. Is this just cynical? (meaning?) Edgar Allen Poe said nothing was ineffable. One qualification we may put on this is that nothing thinkable is ineffable. One way to read this is that everything thinkable can be expressed in common language; the introduction of technical vocabulary, or new languages, is always unnecessary. We could refine this further to an a priori suspicion more than a provable truth: if we feel driven to esoteric language to express our esoteric thought, then we should first suspect that we are bad writers. ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Are technical vocabularies justified in philosophy? (partly, but if the philosopher is clear about what he thinks he can express it in simple terms and words, not contrive neologisms and new –isms) Are new ways of using language needed by some philosophies? Or are those who think so just insufficiently agile with common language? (occasionally, but see above) What is clarity? (too vague, specify in specific contexts and examples) Is it reasonable to demand that all philosophy be written clearly? (YES) Is clarity always doctrinally neutral? (meaning?) Does "clarity" mean the same thing to different philosophical paradigms? What are the differences among (1) Kant's reluctance to use examples, (2) Hegel's reluctance to use picture-language, and (3) Dennett's preference for using "intuition pumps"? (point you are trying to make by this?) See Pat Bigelow, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing, Florida State University Press, 1988; Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style, Indiana University Press, 1954; Robert Ginsberg (ed.), The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century, Susquehanna University Press, 1987; Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature, Basil Blackwell, 1990; Berel Lang (ed.), Philosophical Style: An Anthology about the Writing and Reading of Philosophy, Nelson-Hall, 1980; special issue of The Monist on Philosophy as Style and Literature as Philosophy, 63, 4 (October 1980); John J. Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Harvard University Press, 1983; Richard Rorty, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida," in Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism, University of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 90-109. More under Literature as Philosophy, below. Philosophy as literature Are there perspectives that make it fruitful to see philosophy as a sub-genre of literature? (NO!!!) ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) See for example: Collingwood, section of Essay on Philosophical Method Lewis White Beck, essay, "Philosophy as Literature" Juan Marias, Philosophy as Dramatic Theory Kenneth Burke, essay, "Dramatistic Introduction to Kant" (mostly on Kant's ethics) If philosophy is non-cognitive,(meaning? Assumptions to make explicit please) does it then acquire the same value and epistemic standing as literature (whatever those are)? Why or why not? (too vague) If we read the history of philosophy non-immanently as the reflection of personality, how could we distinguish philosophy and literature? (why? Does it require being distinguished?) Are theories (philosophical and scientific) and literary plots (meaning?) variations on a single structure, the story? What would a general theory of stories look like, and how would it force us to reinterpret the nature and history of philosophy? Do great works of philosophy and of literature survive "the test of time" for different reasons? (yes!!! Different discourses, aims, values, functions) How do works of each kind become "dated" (like works of art, fashionable and restricted fades, fashions like Koons, Abramoviz, Yoko One, Tracy Emin, YBP or YBA in art)primarily of historical interest? Can we interpret Kierkegaard's "authorship" (his term), with its many pseudonyms and histrionics, as a gigantic work of literature? What is gained and lost by such a reading? Can we interpret Platonic dialogues as dramas? (if you wish? What purpose will that serve for philosophizing?) What is gained and lost by such a reading? Are philosophy and literature different (insofar as they are different) primarily in genre or primarily in substance? (obviously!!!) Was Aristotle (in the Poetics) right to locate the difference in literature's use of particulars and philosophy's use of universals? What similarities does such a theory recognize or permit? See the bibliography at the end of the next section. Literature as philosophy Can philosophy be written in the genres of literature? Can we say (as Santayana does) that Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe are philosophers? (certain, more personal ‘philosophical’ in the everyday sense of the terms, personal ideologies) Why might a philosopher occasionally expound her ideas in the genres of fiction? (just one way of expression, nothing profound behind that tool) Obvious examples are Rousseau's Emile, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and some works of Lucretius and Voltaire. Can we say the same of the novels of Dostoevsky, Sartre, de Beauvoir, or Iris Murdoch? the poetry of Milton, Blake, or Wordsworth? How would you characterize the boundaries between philosophy and literature today?(different disciplines and tools with different purposes and functions) In the past, e.g., in the generation of Goethe? Shakespeare? Plato? Hesiod? What makes the boundary between philosophy and literature change over time? (does it?)What changes have occurred? Can you correlate the changes with philosophically important changes in the history of philosophy, or with critically important changes in the history of literature? Is it unfair to literature, or to philosophy, to see literature as "empirical philosophy" that makes its position known through concrete particulars? (pointless question) Why is the novel a genre more commonly used by existentialists than by other kinds of philosophers? (existentialism deals with a certain kind of ‘philosophy’ of the more concrete situations of the human condition than what abstract thinking philosophy enables it to do) See Anthony J. Cascardi, The Bounds of Reason: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Columbia University Press, 1986; Anthony J. Cascardi (ed.), Literature and the Question of Philosophy, John Hopkins University Press, 1987; Albert Cook, The Stance of Plato, Rowman & Littlefield, 1995; Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding, University of Chicago Press, 1990; Ethan Fishman, Likely Stories: Essays on Political Philosophy and Contemporary American Literature, University of Florida Press, 1989; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, trans. Robert H. Paslick, SUNY Press, 1993 (on Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke, and others); Jill Gordon, Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato's Dialogues, Penn State University Press, 1999; Thomas Gould, The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1991; Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, MIT Press, 1990 (contains a section called "Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature," pp. 185-326); Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy: The French Example, Collier Books, 1962; Richard Kuhns, Structures of Experience: Essays on the Affinity Between Philosophy and Literature, 1970; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature, Basil Blackwell, 1990; Bernd Magnus et al, Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature, Routledge, 1992; Donald G. Marshall (ed.), Literature as Philosophy, Philosophy as Literature, University of Iowa Press, 1987; Martha Craven Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1990; Mark Taylor, Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 1986 (interplay of lit. and philosophy from Kant to Derrida); Samuel Weber, Demarcating the Disciplines: Philosophy, Literature, Art, University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Also see the journal, Philosophy and Literature, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Interpreting Philosophy When we read a philosophy text, must we assimilate the position we find to our own terms in order to understand it?(yes) Does understanding always require assimilation? (NO, ) ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) If so, then is understanding always distorted? (too vague) If not, how can understanding occur without assimilation? (too vague, speficy) If understanding requires assimilation, then could there be incommensurable disagreements that we simply never notice? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following We might not notice them because we assimilate the incommensurable other and it seems commensurable to us, or because the incommensurable other never comes into focus (our understanding) sufficiently for us to acknowledge its existence or content. If understanding requires assimilation, then must we be unfair to positions in conflict with our own? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following Do we beg the question to judge positions we read by our own standards rather than judging our own position by the standards of the position we are reading? What if our own position explains away the position we are reading, as opposed to explaining it? Can we avoid judging a conflicting paradigm from the partisan position of our own paradigm? If not, what does this imply about the permanency of disagreement, the fairness of judgments, and the nature of interpretation and debate? Does fairness require commensurability? What follows for the ethics of argument from that fact that we can demand fairness but cannot demand commensurability? If there is incommensurability, or simply assimilation without incommensurability, then the ideal speech situation is violated. ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Does this mean that "logical rudeness" is unavoidable, and non-ideological agreement foreclosed? Do philosophers intend a single meaning that her readers can discover with due diligence? Is 'good' interpretation 'accurate' interpretation that uncovers the historical intention of the author? Or is this model of textual understanding simply inadequate? What can the interpretation of philosophy learn from literary theory on this question? Does it matter that philosophy is "non-fiction"? Philosophical beauty Can philosophy be beautiful? If so, how does philosophical beauty differ from literary, scientific, and mathematical beauty? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) (Meaningless notions, irrelevant to philosophy) Is philosophical beauty linked in any way to the content of the philosophy? For example, is the harmony of form and content beautiful? Is truth an element of beauty? Were Shaftesbury and Keats right to identify truth and beauty? Do we often use beauty as an unacknowledged criterion of truth? Can we acknowledge and justify this practice? Is the distinction between the beauty of expression (language and organization) and the beauty of ideas (content) easier to make, or harder, in philosophy than in literature? What are some beautiful works or theories of philosophy? Are there "great" works of philosophy that are not beautiful? Are there beautiful works that are not great? What are the elements of philosophical ugliness? Philosophy as science Is philosophy a science, as so many philosophers have claimed? If so, how can we explain the wide and deep disagreements in philosophy? (NO) ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following Compare the visions of philosophy as a science of two or more philosophers, e.g. Kant, Hegel, Husserl. What model of science was used? How appropriate was it? If inappropriate, what dimensions of philosophy did it violate or ignore? What features of science have led so many philosophers to try to emulate it? (specify) In what periods has philosophy most and least emulated its contemporary science? Can you correlate the coming and going of such periods with the state of science? with the state of philosophy? How tenable is it to say that the sciences were once part of philosophy and were jettisoned when they became scientific? What does that imply about the nature of what currently passes under the name of philosophy? (explore detailed cases of disciplines being differentiated etc) Do philosophers who believe that philosophy is capable of discovering truths (misleading notion) thereby believe that philosophy is some kind of science? Can philosophy be cognitive and unscientific? (meaning?) If so, how? See C.J. Ducasse, Philosophy as a Science: Its Matter and Its Method, Oskar Piest, 1941 (on many different models of philosophy as a science); Edmund Husserl, "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," Logos, 1 (1910-11) 289-95; Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1992 (against science as a model for philosophy); Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, University of California Press, 1951. Philosophy and related fields and activities How is philosophy different from (and similar to) religion, theology, faith, literature, empirical science, history, mathematics, logic, linguistics, dreaming, guessing, common sense, play? (Related? SPECIFY) ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Take a religious philosopher and ask what, in her view, religion offers that philosophy does not, and vice versa. (This will tend to highlight her metaphilosophy.) Ditto with a scientific philosopher; with an artistic philosopher; with a literary philosopher.... What are the most important similarities and differences between philosophy and the Glass Bead Game? If all knowledge is a seamless web, and only artificially divided into "fields", then what is the place and function of philosophy? It is often said that philosophy synthesizes the insights or principles of the different sciences and humanistic disciplines. Is this true?(NO!!) If so, how are these syntheses made and what is their intellectual value? To what extent is philosophy parasitic on the other disciplines? Must good philosophers be well-acquainted with many other fields? What are the sources of philosophical inspiration? (TOO VAGUE, specify factors, examples and variables) How much philosophy could be done without the results of other disciplines? How much philosophy is stimulated by other philosophy, and how much by science or art, and how much by "life itself"? Are there results in any of the special sciences, e.g. logic, that philosophers must accept to be good philosophers? Or are all such results open to philosophical criticism? (specify?) Can philosophy make a contribution to the solution of problems within the natural or social sciences? If so, how? Can you think of possible or actual cases. Thomas Kuhn believes that when scientific paradigms are tottering, scientists turn more often to philosophy,(meaning?) which provides fresh creative insights. When paradigms are stable, one of their beneficial functions is to protect scientists from the need to ask foundational questions so they can do necessary detail-work. This view makes philosophy useful, alluring, and dangerous all at once. Is this view historically correct? What plays the role for philosophy that philosophy plays for science? (NONE) Recall how Mill and James were both cured of severe depressions that halted their philosophical work by immersion in poetry (Wordsworth for Mill, Whitman for James). Music seems to have played a similar role for Socrates and Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein was a gardener in a monastery, and watched American westerns from the front row, when he needed distraction from philosophy, (correct, momentary to try and stop the dread of having no clear, or not yet clear or clarified, intuitions – when they arrive, the philosopher will begin to conceptualize them and their implications, before they arrive the philosopher experiences his state of mind, life as lost, meaningless, pointless, confused – so watch westerns, have sex, eat, sleep, whatever) or a fresh wind in the doldrums. (so? All sorts of things awaken intuition in different people. Some will paint, play or compose music, watch films, DVDs, ‘watch’ or rather ‘look at’ cricket, sport, rugby, football, cycling, athletics, plays, films on television without the sound and merely the visuals, cook and eat. All activities to still the mind when the stage of the intuitive brooding aspect or pre-conceptual stage of the appearing in the ‘mind’ or brain of new, not yet conceptualized philosophical ‘problems’, almost but not yet clear questions and ‘issues’.) Is philosophy essentially playful? (no, too general) See Huizinga on philosophy and play; Richard Hofstadter on intellectualism as piety and play; Schiller on centrality of play to being human; Kant on play and reason in third Critique; Gadamer on play; play in Glass Bead Game; Socratic method. Has the relation between philosophy and other academic disciplines changed over time? If so, it is more a function of changes within philosophy or changes within the other disciplines? (no) Did the fairly sudden success of the physical sciences in the 17th century change philosophy? If so, how exactly? What does this show about the relation between philosophy and science? (no) How did philosophy emerge from non-philosophy? (what does this mean? Either there is or you do philosophy or you don’t – what is this non-philosophy that precedes philosophical ways of thinking? Why define the absence of philosophy in terms of philosophy? Use other ways to conceptualize that state or situation or condition) Why? How did it differentiate itself from proto-science, religion, and myth? Why do we think Thales was the first philosopher? If not Thales but x, then why x? See Alasdair MacIntyre, "Philosophy, the 'Other' Disciplines, and Their Histories," Soundings, 65 (1982) 127-45. Philosophy and argument Are there forms of argument peculiar to philosophy? How is "philosophical reasoning" unlike other kinds of reasoning? (too general) ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Consider the charge of infinite regress, self-referential inconsistency. Must philosophy be argued? (yes in certain contexts and certain stages/steps of theorizing)) What is the value of philosophical works that are not at all argued, e.g. some aphoristic works, Wittgenstein's Tractatus? What is the role of argument in philosophy? To prove? To persuade without necessarily proving? To show the linkage of ideas without necessarily persuading or proving? Something else? (many functions) If abstruse arguments are not persuasive, even when sound (Hume), then what are the chances that a sophisticated philosophy can be "lived"? (meaning?) If argument is not essential to philosophy, could it still be essential to a philosophical curriculum? What is the value to philosophers of learning to analyze and compose arguments? (it is essential to certain contexts of philosophy) Must different genres of philosophy use argument differently? (specify) Do systems encounter special problems in supporting themselves by argument not encountered by essays? Vice versa? What philosophical reasons have been given in the tradition to excuse the lack of argument in a given work or for a certain assertion? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) E.g., it's a matter of faith; it's more certain than any proof; it's admittedly hypothetical; it's a sheer choice; it's presupposed by the very concept of argument, logically prior to any argument; it's a "potential contribution" In general is contemporary philosophy more rigorous in its arguments than prior philosophy? More self-conscious in making arguments? More demanding that arguments be made in works of philosophy? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) Is it the other way around? Is the importance of argument cyclical instead? What drives the fortunes of argument in the history of philosophy? Philosophy and wisdom What is wisdom? How does it differ (if at all) from knowledge? from virtue? (specify) Is wisdom non-cognitive? Was Socrates right that wisdom is compatible with, or even the same as, ignorance? Can philosophy bring us closer to wisdom? If so, how? Is philosophy better or worse at bringing us to wisdom than other kinds of study or practice? (no, one way, one tool) Compare the visions of wisdom in a few philosophers. Does philosophy still love wisdom? (too general) If it has other ends, what might they be? If it has ceased to love wisdom, roughly when and why did it cease to do so? For a given work of philosophy, what is its vision of wisdom (if any), and how does it (if at all) promote wisdom in its readers? How does a work of philosophy that is not explicitly about wisdom reveal or betray its vision of wisdom? (?) How does a work of philosophy that ostensively argues for certain conclusions and articulates a doctrine promote wisdom? May we properly object if a work of philosophy has no intention to promote the wisdom of its readers? What is the place of play and humor in philosophy? How are they related to wisdom? Who was more right, Pythagoras for humbly calling himself a mere lover of wisdom (philo-sopher), or Hegel for saying that the time has come to go beyond love to the actual attainment and science of wisdom? Philosophy and metaphilosophy What is the relation of philosophy and metaphilosophy? (many relations, the latter explores the subject-matter, methods, assumptions of philosophy. See my many articles etc on meta-philosophy at Academic.Edu) Compare the envelopment of metaphilosophy by philosophy in a few philosophers. That is, how has reflection on metaphilosophical problems affected (for better or worse) answers to philosophical questions? Can metaphilosophical reflection help solve philosophical problems? (yes, it is essential) Is there any philosophical point in deciding the scope, nature, or value of philosophy? (yes, clarify it and making misleading notions explicit) Is "philosophy" a descriptive or normative term? (descriptive and explorative, rather than reviosnary and speculative) If the distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy makes sense (even provisionally), then is there an infinite series of meta-meta-meta...-philosophical questions and perspectives? (NO) If metaphilosophy is a "branch" of philosophy, is it one like ethics that is done in one book while epistemology is done in another book? If not, just how is metaphilosophy assimilated to (absorbed by, subordinated to) philosophy? (not assimilated – second-order in relation to philosophizing) Is the metaphilosophical self-consciousness of philosophy increasing with time?(YES, because of growing self and meat –cognition and –awareness of philosophers) If so, why? Is this a sign of progress?(no, merely a function) If so, what kind? regress? (no) Compare a few philosophers on how they distinguished (in theory and in practice) between bad philosophy and non-philosophy. How do these methods shed light on those philosophers' views of the nature of philosophy? If there are interesting disparities between the theory and practice of philosophers in making this distinction, what does that say about their metaphilosophy? Philosophy and the folk Does everyone "have a philosophy"? (yes, wrong, mistaken use of the word) How important is it to think about philosophical questions explicitly, e.g. by studying the books of philosophers? (none) Can all good philosophy be exoteric? If not, why not? (meaning?) Is it an objection that a philosophy is not as exoteric as it could be? Is Kant right that philosophy need not be popular, (YES) that is, accessible to non-professionals? (obviously) Are argumentative rigor and technical terminology dispensable from philosophy? At what price? (depends on the context and stage of theorizing) What about conceptual difficulty and complexity? Is "common sense" the ultimate criterion of philosophy, as John Kekes suggests? Or does (good) philosophy routinely violate common sense? (too vague, specify) Is Nicholas Rescher correct to suggest that the origin of philosophy lies in the attempt to make consistent the endoxa (ordinary beliefs) that we inherit from our culture? (nonsense as usual from Rescher) Aristotle's methodological remarks in the Nichomachean Ethics suggest that we should consult and juxtapose inherited moral beliefs as the first step of moral philosophy.(specify) Why is this likely to be helpful? Cabell said bitterly that literature was a starveling cult kept alive by the literary. Is philosophy a starveling cult kept alive by the philosophical, irrelevant to the lives of non-philosophers? (meaning? And if this is the case, so what?) In Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann shows the disastrous effect on a businessman of picking up a volume of Schopenhauer. Philosophy was once read by the educated lay public as commonly as literature was. (Does it matter who reads philosophy or literature, listen to music, etc – for leisure when they have nothing better to do to fill their free time? This does not affect philosophy, the creative-thinking philosopher, the novelist or the composer) What happened, and was it (entirely) regrettable? (irrelevant) When was philosophy commonly read by the general educated public? Does the history of the esoteric and exoteric pendulum in philosophy shed any light on the value and possibility of reaching a general audience, or on the kinds of philosophy that may do so? (Why should philosophy, sciences, classical music, Fine Art, etc reach a ‘general’ audience?) What happened to the nature of philosophy as it became a special field, an academic department, a profession? (what are you trying to say?) And what happened to its practice and popularity? (specify) If we distinguish philosophical beliefs from ordinary beliefs, how do (and how should) philosophers live ordinary lives? To what extent must philosophical beliefs be put aside to take part in ordinary life (Hume, Fichte)? (nothing to do with philosophy, seems like morality?) Is there a presumption in favor of "common sense", or agreement with "the folk", such that philosophers must explain their departures from (more than their agreement with) these norms? What is the nature of the pressure to explain these departures? (nonsense) Do philosophers assume too hastily that there is a "natural consciousness" or non-philosophical mind? What are the differences between the disagreements among philosophers and the disagreements among other folk? (meaning? Specify) The term "natural consciousness" is used in Hegel, "natural standpoint" in Husserl and other phenomenologists. Find philosophers who use folk consciousness as a paradigm of error, and as a test or criterion of truth. What are the fundamental epistemological and political disagreements among such philosophers? Philosophy and 'primitive' life What is the relation between philosophy and myth? ? (give specific cases, too general and too many assumptions for all of these, identify your assumptions and specify your questions, and applies to all of the following) How do Socrates and Plato use myth for philosophical purposes? What is the subsequent history of this use? What is the prehistory of this use? Can philosophy fruitfully be seen as originating in myth? Cf. Schelling's call for a new mythology at the end of his System of Transcendental Philosophy. What kind of philosophy can precede a scientific consciousness and what kinds can follow it? Is there a stage in the history of culture when philosophy is indistinguishable from religion? from shamanism? See Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, D. Appleton, 1927 (reprinted, Dover, 1957); John Sallis (ed.), Philosophy and Archaic Experience, Duquesne University Press, 1982. Philosophy and philosophers What is gained and what is lost by studying philosophical texts apart from the biographies of their authors? To what extent, and for what purposes, should we bring in biography? (what would be the purpose and function of dong this?) Compare the autobiographies of a few philosophers on their relation to their philosophies. (Try Croce, Mill, Collingwood, Jung, Quine, Rescher.) Why have so few philosophers written autobiographies, compared, say, to novelists or diplomats? (is this philosophically relevant? How?) To what extent is philosophy autobiographical? (yes, a biography of certain aspects of the consciousness, stream of consciousness, of the individual) See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §6: "...every great philosophy so far has been...the personal confession of its author and a kind of unconscious memoir". See Ernest Campbell Mossner, "Philosophy and Biography," in his Hume, Doubleday, 1966. See de Beauvoir's many-volume autobiography where, if anywhere, she expounds her philosophical position. The psychological motives, economic interests, and personal animosities of a philosopher may all be sources of his/her work. (correct) How relevant are they to our evaluation of that work? (NOT RELEVANT) Does the recognition of causes for belief undermine the recognition of reasons for belief? (specify the relation, too vague, many intermediary variables and factors) When we say that the life-and-times of a philosopher "illuminate" her work, or that her life situation "influenced" her work, can we make sense of these claims without reducing philosophy a complex effect of blind causation? Is there a slippery slope from influence to reduction? If not, what is the "snag" that keeps reasons from sliding to causes? (no relevant to philosophy) Do non-immanent reductions of philosophy necessarily entail relativism and determinism? (no) Must they be self-referentially inconsistent? (no) What parts of a philosophy can biography most illuminate? (can it?) Its truth-value? the proper interpretation of its texts? the philosopher's choice of topics, scope of coverage, emphasis? expositional style and structure? idea of the audience, hence, degree of rigor, use of technical language, political appeals? (are these philosophical relevant questions?) Steven Bartlett has written that philosophers as a group are typically individualistic and even narcissistic, more concerned to develop their own thought than to share or understand the thought of others. How true is this? (yes very true) Does philosophy appeal only to certain personality types? (YES) If so, what non-immanent perspectives on philosophy does this suggest? Could philosophy be a neurosis? (yes) Which came first, psychological tendencies or philosophical positions? (psychological) Might the latter have their own autonomy and simply attract (rather than being explained by) the former? (depends on what your purpose of explanation is) Should we always explain the latter through the former instead of sometimes the former through the latter? (depends on your aim) May we legitimately call someone a philosopher who denied that she was a philosopher? (nonsense , pointless question) (See case of Simone de Beauvoir; cf. Dostoevsky, Camus, Buber.) May we deny the name of philosopher to one who called himself a philosopher? (Analytic philosophers often deny that their non-analytic colleagues are philosophers.) How would we, and how should we, interpret the works of a philosopher with known moral failings? (irrelevant to some of his philosophical texts, relevant to others) For example: Nietzsche was a vicious misogynist, Charles Peirce beat his wife, Heidegger was a Nazi. See the case of Paul de Man, an influential deconstructionist lately revealed to have been an early Nazi propagandist. Do these failings contaminate all the writings by that philosopher, perhaps on a theory that(speculation) a philosophical position comes from the whole person? Can we compartmentalize, and hold a philosopher benighted on questions of gender or politics, but profound on epistemology, metaphysics, or perhaps even other topics within ethics? (YES, that is how it works) Do we deliberately ignore such failings on the ground that to let them diminish our assessment of the writings would commit the genetic fallacy? (no) In answering this question, how do we factor in our belief that everyone has moral failings, including we ourselves? (specify and investigate) How would we, and how should we, change our evaluation of a philosopher's work if we learned that he killed someone in cold blood? ( do not , no need to do this) See case of Louis Althusser, who murdered his wife at the height of his respect and influence as a Marx scholar. If a philosophy cannot 'be lived', what legitimately follows about its worth as a philosophy? See e.g. Hume. (two different questions, judge a life, judge a philosophical system, theory or model) See: William Earle, "Philosophy as Autobiography," in his Public Sorrows and Private Pleasures, Indiana University Press, 1976, pp. 161-75; C.E.M. Joad, "Thought and Temperament," pp. 218-52 of his Essays in Common Sense Philosophy, George Allen & Unwin, 2d ed. 1933; Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass, Open Court, 1985; Albert W. Levi, "The Mental Crisis of John Stuart Mill," Psychoanalytic Review, V, xxxii (1945) 86-101; Fay Horton Sawyier, "Philosophy as Autobiography: John Stuart Mill's Case," Philosophy Research Archives, 11 (1985) 169-79; Ben-Ami Scharfstein, The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought, Basil Blackwell, 1980. This is a selective bibliography; see my longer bibliography in a separate handout. Philosophy and pedagogy How should philosophy be taught? (too vague, specify, taught to whom and for what purpose? Children, teanager, students of other disciplines, philosophy majors, to become academic professional philosopher or taught to the very few creative-original-thinking philosophers who will be/come philosophers in spite of being taught and even if they were never taught!!!!) What metaphilosophical questions must be answered before we can decide how philosophy should best be taught? (specify, see above – taught to whom, for what reasons, etc) Compare the following approaches: (all relevant depending on the contexts of teaching, see above) emphasis on topics, doctrines, texts, questions, periods, figures lecture, discussion, dialogue, questioning, answering, reading waiting for questions to arise in life What background should one have prior to the study of philosophy? (none, have a brain and be seriously interested) Should philosophy be taught academically to 18 year olds? (perhaps, depends on the individuals) Most philosophers were not addressing readers so young. Most philosophical questions arise naturally in life, but not necessarily by age 18. Fichte thought it preferable to address young people who had not already committed themselves to a philosophical position. Can philosophy be taught to elementary school children? (if you have to, to some pupils) Can philosophy, responsibly taught, "corrupt youth"? In the Athenian sense of this phrase, can it avoid "corrupting youth"? (nonsense) Has the nature or direction of philosophy changed since most philosophers became professors of philosophy (academics, that is, middle class professionals with lower class incomes) roughly during the lifetime of Kant? (YES, unfortunately and sadly so. Distinguish between those with qualifications in philosophy like academic philosophers and professionals AND original-, creative-thinking real philosophers) See David W. Hamlyn, Being a Philosopher: The History of a Practice, Routledge, 1992. Philosophy and literature share the problem of the "canon". (NO) How do we decide which works should be taught in an undergraduate curriculum when there is not enough time to teach everything? (This is similar to, but significantly different from, the question which books we should read ourselves, knowing we cannot read them all.) Are "the classics" classical only by criteria that are class-biased and injurious to minority viewpoints? (specify) Even if so, should "the classics" be given a large slice of the curriculum simply because they have moulded, and do comprise, the actual tradition? (specify) If we say 'no', are we substituting wishful thinking for historical fact? If we say 'yes', are we perpetuating an injury? Are we more justified, or less justified, in following this path if our curriculum is limited to the Western (European) tradition? (meaning?) What time should be allotted to contemporary works that have not had the chance to be "tested by time"? (specify) What time should be allotted to heterodox works that challenge the traditional canon? (specify) Is this kind of challenge a good idea in philosophy even if the classics are classical because they are actually great and universal? That is, is it part of good philosophy teaching to challenge even great works, even with flimsy works? (specify) If some mix of classical and non-classical works seems best, what specific criteria should we use when it is painfully clear that every non-classical work will squeeze out a classical work (some work "that every philosophy student should know")? (specify) Return to the Metaphilosophy course home-page. Peter Suber, Department of Philosophy, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374, U.S.A. peters@earlham.edu. Copyright © 1997-2000. Peter Suber. 14 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/meta.12228/full On the Domain of Metaphilosophy First published: 16 January 2017 Bob Plant Abstract This article argues for four interrelated claims: (i) Metaphilosophy is not one sub-discipline of philosophy, nor is it restricted to questions of methodology.(OBVIOUSLY!!) Rather, metaphilosophical inquiry encompasses (SOME OF )the general background conditions of philosophical practice. (ii) These background conditions are of various sorts, not only those routinely considered “philosophical” but also those considered biographical, historical, and sociological.(when relevant) Accordingly, we should be wary of the customary distinction between what is proper (internal) and merely contingent (external) to philosophy. (iii) “What is philosophy?” is best understood as a practical question concerning how members of different philosophical sub-communities identify what is pertinent to their respective activities and self-conceptions. (iv) Given (i)–(iii), understanding what philosophy is requires us to take more seriously the social-institutional dimension of contemporary philosophical practice. The task of philosophers who seek to define their subject is akin to that of fools who attempt to shovel smoke. It is not exactly that there's nothing there, but whatever it is, it isn't amenable to shovelling. (Mandt 1991, 77) SEE APPENDIX for full article 15 http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0074.xml Metaphilosophy Yuri Cath LAST REVIEWED: 08 October 2015 LAST MODIFIED: 29 June 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-007 Introduction 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,(see my work on this – it IS well-defined!!) 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. (Notice its narrow scope!!) General Overviews Currently there is a lack of more general overviews of metaphilosophy or philosophical methodology.(see my many articles on this at Academia. Edu) However, there are a number of good overviews of more narrowly defined topics within these areas. Braddon-Mitchell and Nola 2009 outlines the influential “Canberra Plan” project in philosophical methodology. Manley 2009 provides a very useful overview of the recent literature on metametaphysics, as does Eklund 2006. Nagel 2007 provides an excellent overview of the literature on epistemic intuitions. Daniels 2009 gives a good overview of work in moral philosophy on the method of reflective equilibrium. Gutting 2009 is a book on philosophical knowledge that closely examines the methods of a number of famous philosophers. Papineau 2009 is a survey article on naturalism that includes a good overview of methodological naturalism. Alexander and Weinberg 2007 gives a good introduction to the experimental philosophy movement and some of the most important works in that literature—see also Knobe and Nichols 2008 cited under Anthologies and Collections. Alexander, Joshua, and Jonathan M. Weinberg. “Analytic Epistemology and Experimental Philosophy.” Philosophy Compass 2.1 (2007): 56–80. E-mail Citation » A good survey article on experimental philosophy. Distinguishes two importantly different views of the relationship between experimental philosophy and traditional philosophy, responds to criticisms of experimental philosophy, and suggests future directions for research in this area.(restrictive) Braddon-Mitchell, David, and Robert Nola. “Introducing the Canberra Plan.” In Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism. Edited by David Braddon-Mitchell and Robert Nola, 1–20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. E-mail Citation » A useful introduction to the project in philosophical methodology and conceptual analysis known as the “Canberra Plan,” associated most closely with the work of Frank Jackson and David Lewis. Describes the origins of the Canberra Plan in work by Ramsey, Carnap, and Lewis on theoretical terms. (very restrictive) Daniels, Norman. “Reflective Equilibrium” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2009. E-mail Citation » A good introduction to the method of reflective equilibrium, focused primarily on the extensive literature on this subject in moral philosophy. Eklund, Matti. “Metaontology.” Philosophy Compass 1.3 (2006): 317–334. E-mail Citation » A good survey article of some of the central issues in recent metametaphysical debates about the status and methodology of disputes in ontology. Gutting, Gary. What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. E-mail Citation » A book arguing that analytic philosophy as a discipline has achieved a great deal of knowledge (data, information instead of insights and philosophical understanding) over the last fifty years. Unlike many discussions of philosophical methodology, this book has the important virtue of basing its conclusions on a series of detailed case studies of the methods and arguments of important works in analytic philosophy. Manley, David. “Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics.” In Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Edited by David J. Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, 1–37. Oxford: Clarendon, 2009. E-mail Citation » An excellent first introduction to debates in metametaphysics on the question of what, if any, metaphysical disputes are trivial or merely verbal disputes. Nagel, Jennifer. “Epistemic Intuitions.” Philosophy Compass 2.6 (2007): 792–819. E-mail Citation » A very good overview of metaphilosophical debates about the status and nature of epistemic intuitions; also shows how empirical evidence from linguistics and psychology connects with these debates. Papineau, David. “Naturalism” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2009. E-mail Citation » This article contains a very good introduction to methodological naturalism. It clearly explains the difference between methodological and ontological versions of naturalism and examines the relation of methodological naturalism to conceptual analysis and the use of intuitions in philosophy. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions and individuals. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here. Purchase an Ebook Version of This Article Ebooks of the Oxford Bibliographies Online subject articles are available in North America via a number of retailers including Amazon, vitalsource, and more. Simply search on their sites for Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guides and your desired subject article. If you would like to purchase an eBook article and live outside North America please email onlinemarketing@oup.com to express your interest. http://www.ditext.com/encyc/frame.html Meta-Encyclopedia of Philosophy A| B| C| D| E| F| G| H| I| J| K| L| M| N| O| P| Q| R| S| T| U| V| W| X| Y| Z Compare topics in the most important Encyclopedias and Dictionaries of Philosophy on the Internet. To find a word, click on a letter in the upper window. Data will then appear in this window. Entries are in the left column; sources in the other columns. If a source has an entry, it is marked with a linked "X". This is a dynamic resource which will be updated to keep up with changes in the targeted sites. There is also room to add new sites. (R) Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, 1942. (I) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (S) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (M)  Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind (B)  The Ism Book (C) The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) (N)  A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names 16 Many notions such as consciousness, mind, body, the embodied person, intersubjectivity of communities, minds, groups, sub-cultures, consciousness, and embodied selves and problems related to them such as mind-body problem, must be explored and these umbrella terms be differentiated as more specific and meaningful concepts. In these ways the present seemingly ineffable will become more meaningfully conceptualized and therefore no longer not verbalized, baffling problems. Another so-called philosophical problem, in fact an umbrella-word or notion for many different, even unrelated problems is that of free-will. Specify what you mean by notions such as these in a particular context or situation. Then you will notice that it concerns someone’s choice to perform a certain behaviour or nor and/or to make a certain decision such as: shall I go to sleep or stay awake and read or watch, shall I drink (more) or not, shall I walk or drive, go out or stay in. Then one could identify the factors and attitudes that are involved in the case of particular individuals who make such decisions or choices. A generalized question like this is meaningless and only lead to speculations and attempts at meaningless responses such as generalizations. There exist no such thing as free will (in general), only specific instances of making a choice or taking a decision in particular contexts or situations concerning specific things, actions, behaviour etc. No one ever sits down and decides: now I will act out of free will or from now on I will act as if all my activities or behaviour, thoughts, choices and actions are determined by certain factors. The lesson to be learned from this: do not fabricate or accept the fabrications no matter how persuasive of others concerning such generalized, meaningless, irrelevant problems or problems that are invented by means of or in terms of them. Much of epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology and notions such as the ‘mind-body problem’, ‘consciousness, ‘the connection between consciousness, mind, mental things, thinking or thoughts in general and the brain’ are conceived and fabricated in these generalized ways (and by means of fallacies in thinking) and manner. Identify and name the fallacies leading to them or that play a role in the conceiving of so-called philosophical problems – this is one, of many, sure way to shortcut and prevent the development of such problems. In the following section, do NOT let your thinking be determined and controlled by mistaken conventions and misleading thinking or restricted ideas and concepts. 17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_philosophy This is a list of some of the major unsolved problems in philosophy. Clearly, unsolved philosophical problems exist in the lay sense (e.g. "What is the meaning of life?", "Where did we come from?", "What is reality?", etc.). However, professional philosophers generally accord serious philosophical problems specific names or questions, which indicate a particular method of attack or line of reasoning. (-ism) As a result, broad and untenable topics become manageable. It would therefore be beyond the scope of this article to categorize "life" (and similar vague categories) as an unsolved philosophical problem. Contents 1 Aesthetics 1.1 Essentialism 1.2 Art objects 2 Epistemology 2.1 Gettier problem Plato suggests, in his Theaetetus (210a) and Meno (97a–98b), that "knowledge" may be defined as justified true belief. For over two millennia, this definition of knowledge has been reinforced and accepted by subsequent philosophers. An item of information's justifiability, truth, and belief have been seen as the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. In 1963, however, Edmund Gettier published an article in the periodical Analysis entitled "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", offering instances of justified true belief that do not conform to the generally understood meaning of "knowledge." Gettier's examples hinged on instances of epistemic luck: cases where a person appears to have sound evidence for a proposition, and that proposition is in fact true, but the apparent evidence is not causally related to the proposition's truth. In response to Gettier's article, numerous philosophers[who?] have offered modified criteria for "knowledge." There is no general consensus to adopt any of the modified definitions yet proposed. Finally, if infallibilism is true, that would seem to definitively solve the Gettier problem for good--the idea is that knowledge requires certainty, such that, certainty is what serves to bridge the gap so that we arrive at knowledge, which means we would have an adequate definition of knowledge. However, infallibilism is rejected by the overwhelming majority of philosophers/epistemologists, even though it would solve the Gettier problem (if true). 2.2 Problem of the criterion 2.3 Molyneux problem The Molyneux problem dates back to the following question posed by William Molyneux to John Locke in the 17th century: if a man born blind, and able to distinguish by touch between a cube and a globe, were made to see, could he now tell by sight which was the cube and which the globe, before he touched them? The problem raises fundamental issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, and was widely discussed after Locke included it in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[2] A similar problem was also addressed earlier in the 12th century by Ibn Tufail (Abubacer), in his philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Philosophus Autodidactus). His version of the problem, however, dealt mainly with colors rather than shapes.[3][4] Modern science may now have the tools necessary to test this problem in controlled environments. The resolution of this problem is in some sense provided by the study of human subjects who gain vision after extended congenital blindness. One such subject took approximately a year to recognize most household objects purely by sight.[citation needed] This indicates that this may no longer be an unsolved problem in philosophy. 2.4 Münchhausen trilemma The Münchhausen trilemma, also called Agrippa's trilemma, purports that it is impossible to prove any certain truth even in fields such as logic and mathematics. According to this argument, the proof of any theory rests either on circular reasoning, infinite regress, or unproven axioms. 2.5 Qualia The question hinges on whether color is a product of the mind or an inherent property of objects. While most philosophers will agree that color assignment corresponds to spectra of light frequencies, it is not at all clear whether the particular psychological phenomena of color are imposed on these visual signals by the mind, or whether such qualia are somehow naturally associated with their noumena. Another way to look at this question is to assume two people ("Fred" and "George" for the sake of convenience) see colors differently. (This entire field – like many of the domains, contexts and fields referred to by the ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’ and numerous other ‘mental’-umbrella notions. This field requires exploration, identification of numerous not yet differentiated or ‘perceived and/or thought’ phenomena that requires conceptualization.) 3 Ethics 3.1 Moral luck 3.2 Moral knowledge 4 Philosophy of mathematics 4.1 Mathematical objects 5 Metaphysics 5.1 Sorites paradox Otherwise known as the "paradox of the heap", the question regards how one defines a "thing." Is a bale of hay still a bale of hay if you remove one straw? If so, is it still a bale of hay if you remove another straw? If you continue this way, you will eventually deplete the entire bale of hay, and the question is: at what point is it no longer a bale of hay? While this may initially seem like a superficial problem, it penetrates to fundamental issues regarding how we define objects. (and when we do not have suitably, specific notions of something or some idea. A bale of hay in construction, or almost fully constructed. It seems as if some of these so-called ‘problems’ concern processes, ongoing processes, actions or activities) This is similar to Theseus' paradox and the Continuum fallacy. (When does hand become a fist or is no longer a fist but a hand. Specify ideas to identify these things, like the thousands of words used by Eskimos for snow-related conditions – do that with all such cases. The Theseus paradox – merely use the term ‘a partial or wholly re-constructed boat, an open hand, a closed fist, a partially open hand or fist, etc.) 5.2 Counterfactuals A counterfactual is a statement that follows this form: "If Joseph Swan had not invented the modern incandescent light bulb, then someone else would have invented it anyway." People use counterfactuals every day; however, its analysis is not so clear. Swan, after all, did invent the modern incandescent light bulb, so how can the statement be true (instead of true employ – is it meaningful or not?), if it is impossible to examine its correspondence to reality? (See correspondence theory of truth.) 5.3 Material implication 6 Philosophy of mind 6.1 Mind–body problem Just specify these situations and the problems will dissolve – This problem actually defines a field, however its pursuits are specific and easily stated. Firstly, what are the criteria for intelligence? What are the necessary components for defining consciousness? Secondly, how can an outside observer test for these criteria? The "Turing Test" is often cited as a prototypical test of intelligence, although it is almost universally regarded as insufficient. It involves a conversation between a sentient being and a machine, and if the being can't tell he is talking to a machine, it is considered intelligent. A well trained machine, however, could theoretically "parrot" its way through the test. This raises the corollary question of whether it is possible to artificially create consciousness (usually in the context of computers or machines), and of how to tell a well-trained mimic from a sentient entity. Important thought in this area includes most notably: John Searle's Chinese Room, Hubert Dreyfus' non-cognitivist critique, as well as Hilary Putnam's work on Functionalism 6.2 Cognition and AI 6.3 Hard problem of consciousness The hard problem of consciousness is the question of what consciousness is and why we have consciousness as opposed to being philosophical zombies. The adjective "hard" is to contrast with the "easy" consciousness problems, which seek to explain the mechanisms of consciousness ("why" versus "how", or final cause versus efficient cause). The hard problem of consciousness is questioning whether all beings undergo an experience of consciousness rather than questioning the neurological makeup of beings. (re-write this in a more meaningful manner and you will have no problem here). 7 Philosophy of science 7.1 Problem of induction 7.2 Demarcation problem 7.3 Realism Does a world independent of human beliefs and representations exist? Is such a world empirically accessible, or would such a world be forever beyond the bounds of human sense and hence unknowable? Can human activity and agency change the objective structure of the world? These questions continue to receive much attention in the philosophy of science. A clear "yes" to the first question is a hallmark of the scientific realism perspective. Philosophers such as Bas van Fraassen have important and interesting answers to the second question. In addition to the realism vs. empiricism axis of debate, there is a realism vs. social constructivism axis which heats many academic passions. With respect to the third question, Paul Boghossian's "Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism". Oxford University Press. 2006. is a powerful critique of social constructivism, for instance. Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? (Harvard UP, 2000) constitutes a more moderate critique of constructivism, which usefully disambiguates confusing polysemy of the term "constructivism." Identify your assumptions and differentiate the problems! 8 See also 9 References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_unsolved_problems_in_philosophy http://dailynous.com/2016/01/13/unsolved-problems-in-philosophy/ http://a-misconception.blogspot.co.za/2010/09/list-of-unsolved-philosophy-problems.htm http://www.pearltrees.com/u/4206019-philosophy-encyclopedia#l490 http://io9.gizmodo.com/5945801/8-philosophical-questions-that-well-never-solve Here are eight mysteries (??) of philosophy(what has it to do with philosophy in the first place??) that we'll probably never resolve. Lol 1. Why is there something rather than nothing? 2. Is our universe real? 3. Do we have free will? 4. Does God exist? 5. Is there life after death? 6. Can you really experience (your experience already implies a particular, selected perspective – you do not have a bird’s eye view or that of an all-seeing, ubiquitous God) anything objectively? 7. What is the best moral system? 8. What are numbers? 18 Here are ‘meta-philosophical surveys. To me they appear like most social surveys (once a tool in social sciences) and I doubt it they have much relevance to or importance for meta-philosophy as executed by creative- and original-thinking philosophers, doing meta- and or philosophy. They might have some sort of interest for anyone, not just philosophers, interested in such things – social surveys. First of all the Wikipedia article on Meta-philosophy, as it does contain some interesting points and a few references to meta-philosophical related work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphilosophy Contents 1 Relationship to philosophy 2 Terminology 3 Writings 4 Topics Many sub-disciplines of philosophy have their own branch of 'metaphilosophy', examples being Meta-aesthetics, Meta-epistemology, Meta-ethics, Meta-ontology, and so forth.[21] However, some topics within 'metaphilosophy' cut across the various subdivisions of philosophy to consider fundamentals important to all its sub-disciplines. Some of these are mentioned below. 4.1 Aims 4.2 Boundaries While there is some agreement that philosophy involves general or fundamental topics,[32][33][34][verification needed] there is no clear agreement about a series of demarcation issues, including: that between first-order and second-order investigations. Some authors say that philosophical inquiry is second-order, having concepts, theories and presupposition as its subject matter; that it is "thinking about thinking", of a "generally second-order character";[35] that philosophers study, rather than use, the concepts that structure our thinking. However, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy warns that "the borderline between such 'second-order' reflection, and ways of practicing the first-order discipline itself, is not always clear: philosophical problems may be tamed by the advance of a discipline, and the conduct of a discipline may be swayed by philosophical reflection".[36] that between philosophy and empirical science. Some argue that philosophy is distinct from science in that its questions cannot be answered empirically, that is, by observation or experiment.[37][38] Some analytical philosophers argue that all meaningful empirical questions are to be answered by science, not philosophy. However, some schools of contemporary philosophy such as the pragmatists and naturalistic epistemologists argue that philosophy should be linked to science and should be scientific in the broad sense of that term, "preferring to see philosophical reflection as continuous with the best practice of any field of intellectual enquiry".[39] that between philosophy and religion. Some argue that philosophy is distinct from religion in that it allows no place for faith or revelation.[40][verification needed]: that philosophy does not try to answer questions by appeal to revelation, myth or religious knowledge of any kind, but uses reason, "without reference to sensible observation and experiments".[23][verification needed] However, philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Peter Damian have argued that philosophy is the "handmaiden of theology" (ancilla theologiae).[41] 4.3 Methods Philosophical method (or philosophical methodology) is the study of how to do philosophy. A common view among philosophers is that philosophy is distinguished by the ways that philosophers follow in addressing philosophical questions. There is not just one method that philosophers use to answer philosophical questions. Recently, some philosophers have cast doubt about intuition as a basic tool in philosophical inquiry, from Socrates up to contemporary philosophy of language. In Rethinking Intuition[42] various thinkers discard intuition as a valid source of knowledge and thereby call into question 'a priori' philosophy. Experimental philosophy is a form of philosophical inquiry that makes at least partial use of empirical research—especially opinion polling—in order to address persistent philosophical questions. This is in contrast with the methods found in analytic philosophy, whereby some say a philosopher will sometimes begin by appealing to his or her intuitions on an issue and then form an argument with those intuitions as premises.[43] However, disagreement about what experimental philosophy can accomplish is widespread and several philosophers have offered criticisms. One claim is that the empirical data gathered by experimental philosophers can have an indirect effect on philosophical questions by allowing for a better understanding of the underlying psychological processes which lead to philosophical intuitions.[44] 4.4 Progress A prominent question in metaphilosophy is that of whether or not philosophical progress occurs and more so, whether such progress in philosophy is even possible.[45] If there is, or is not, so-called ‘progress in philosophy’ – whatever that may mean , these questions or queries are irrelevant to actual doing of philosophy by the original- and creative-thinker, it will not have an (intra- or external)effect on his thinking. If there is, or is not, progress in art, music, sciences, literature etc, that is not a factor that determines if and how an individual thinks.) It has even been disputed, most notably by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whether genuine philosophical problems actually exist. The opposite has also been claimed, for example by Karl Popper, who held that such problems do exist, that they are solvable, and that he had actually found definite solutions to some of them. David Chalmers divides inquiry into philosophical progress in metaphilosohy into three questions.* The Existence Question: is there progress in philosophy? The Comparison Question: is there as much progress in philosophy as in science? The Explanation Question: why isn’t there more progress in philosophy?[46] 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links * https://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP What Do Philosophers Believe? David Bourget and David J. Chalmers What Do Philosophers Believe? ∗ David Bourget and David J. Chalmers November 30, 2013 Abstract What are the philosophical views of contemporary professional philosophers? We surveyed many professional philosophers in order to help determine their views on thirty central philosophical issues. This article documents the results. It also reveals correlations among philosophical views and between these views and factors such as age, gender, and nationality. A factor analysis suggests that an individual’s views on these issues factor into a few underlying components that predict much of the variation in those views. The results of a metasurvey also suggest that many of the results of the survey are surprising: philosophers as a whole have quite inaccurate beliefs about the distribution of philosophical views in the profession. https://philpapers.org/surveys/ The PhilPapers Surveys Results, Analysis and Discussion The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views, carried out in November 2009. The Survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students. The PhilPapers Metasurvey was a concurrent survey of professional philosophers and others concerning their predictions of the results of the Survey. The Metasurvey was taken by 727 respondents including 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students. Paper The results of the survey and our analysis are discussed in What Do Philosophers Believe? (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies). Results PhilPapers Survey: Results PhilPapers Metasurvey: Results Demographic statistics List of public respondents (with browsable answers) Correlations between the answers of the target faculty group: Most correlated variables (start here) Correlations for all variables (another good starting point) How are the correlations calculated? Geographical effects (region of affiliation): Australasia Canada Europe United Kingdom United States Gender effects: Female Male Age effects Discussion and analysis On the conception and design of the Survey: Editors' thoughts On the results of the Survey: Editors' thoughts Discussion forum (or see below) Factor analysis Survey materials Original Survey (pdf) Original Metasurvey (pdf) Original information page Questions and answer options Target departments https://philpapers.org/philpapers/raw/meta.pdf https://philpapers.org/philpapers/raw/survey.pdf https://philpapers.org/rec/BOUWDP What do philosophers believe? David Bourget & David J. Chalmers Philosophical Studies 170 (3):465-500 (2014) Abstract What are the philosophical views of contemporary professional philosophers? We surveyed many professional philosophers in order to help determine their views on 30 central philosophical issues. This article documents the results. It also reveals correlations among philosophical views and between these views and factors such as age, gender, and nationality. A factor analysis suggests that an individual's views on these issues factor into a few underlying components that predict much of the variation in those views. The results of a metasurvey also suggest that many of the results of the survey are surprising: philosophers as a whole have quite inaccurate beliefs about the distribution of philosophical views in the profession. Keywords Metaphilosophy  Disagreement  Survey  Correlations  Philosophy  PhilPapers Categories Disagreement in Philosophy in Metaphilosophy Metaphilosophy, Misc in Metaphilosophy http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-013-0259-7 http://consc.net/papers/progress.pdf Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy? David J. Chalmers Is there progress in philosophy? I have two reactions to this question. First, the answer is obviously yes. Second, it is the wrong question. The right question is not “Is there progress?” but “Why isn’t there more?”.(This question concerns: The aims and purpose of philosophy as a discourse, discipline and socio-cultural practice. The reasons for doing, thinking and writing philosophy by original and creative thinking philosophers by students as part of their course work, for theses masters, doctors, research by professional academics for their teaching writing of books, articles, speeches, etc. The aims, attitudes, principles, values, motivation, reasons for doing this work will vary for these different groups.) We can distinguish three questions about philosophical progress. The Existence Question: is there progress in philosophy? The Comparison Question: is there as much progress in philosophy as in science? (this is a philosophically external and totally irrelevant question for the doing of philosophy, perhaps it has some kind of inter-disciplinary interest?) The Explanation Question (which tends to presuppose a negative answer to at least one of these two questions): why isn’t there more progress in philosophy? APPENDIX http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/meta.12228/full On the Domain of Metaphilosophy Bob Plant  Abstract  1 Introduction  2 Inside/Outside Philosophy  3 Communicative Norms  4 The Philosophy Industry  5 Is That Philosophy?  6 Meta/Philosophical Integrity  7 Conclusion  Acknowledgments   References Barnes, Jonathan (with Myles Burnyeat, Raymond Geuss, and Barry Stroud). 2008. “Modes of Philosophizing: A Round Table Debate.” Available at: http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2008-05-09-jbarnes-en.pdf. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983. “The Philosophical Institution.” In Philosophy in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiore, 1–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourget, David, and David J. Chalmers. 2013. “What Do Philosophers Believe?” Available at: http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP. Bouveresse, Jacques. 1983. “Why I Am so Very UnFrench.” In Philosophy in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiore, 9–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cottingham, John. 2009. “What Is Humane Philosophy and Why Is It at Risk?” In Conceptions of Philosophy: Royal Institute of Philosophy suppl. 65, edited by Anthony O'Hear, 233–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Couture, Jocelyne, and Kai Nielsen. 1993. “On Construing Philosophy.” In Méta-Philosophie: Reconstructing Philosophy? New Essays in Metaphilosophy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy suppl. 19, edited by Jocelyne Couture and Kai Nielsen, 1–55. Crane, Tim. 2012. “Philosophy, Logic, Science, History.” Metaphilosophy 43, nos. 1–2:20–37. Wiley Online Library | Web of Science® Times Cited: 3 Culler, Jonathan. 2003. “Bad Writing and Good Philosophy.” In Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, 43–57. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Danto, Arthur C. 1984. “Philosophy as/and/of Literature.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 58, no. 1:5–20. CrossRef Danto, Arthur C. 2001. The Body/Body Problem: Selected Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davidson, Donald (with Giovanna Borradori). 1994. “Post-Analytic Visions.” In The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, 40–54. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. A Taste for the Secret. Edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press. Desanti, Jean-Toussaint. 1983. “A Path in Philosophy.” In Philosophy in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiore, 51–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edmonds, David, and Nigel Warburton. 2012. Philosophy Bites. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engel, Pascal. 1987. “Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy.” In Contemporary French Philosophy, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glendinning, Simon. 2002. “The Analytic and the Continental.” In New British Philosophy: The Interviews, edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, 201–16. London: Routledge. Glendinning, Simon. 2006. The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. CrossRef Glendinning, Simon. 2011. “Argument All the Way Down: The Demanding Discipline of Non-Argumento-Centric Modes of Philosophy.” In Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing the Philosophical Divides, edited by Jack Reynolds, James Chase, James Williams, and Edwin Mares, 71–84. London: Continuum. Gross, Neil. 2002. “Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher: Status, Self-Concept, and Intellectual Choice.” American Sociological Review 67, no. 1:52–76. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 25 Gutting, Gary. 2001. French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossRef Gutting, Gary. 2011. Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossRef Harries, Karsten. 2001. “Philosophy in Search of Itself.” In What Is Philosophy? edited by C. P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt, 47–73. New Haven: Yale University Press. Healy, Kieran. 2013. “A Co-Citation Network for Philosophy.” Available at: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/18/a-co-citation-network-for-philosophy/. Hutchison, Katrina, and Fiona Jenkins (eds.). 2013. Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, William. 1920. A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green. Janz, Bruce. 2004. “Philosophy as if Place Mattered: The Situation of African Philosophy.” In What Philosophy Is, edited by Havi Carel and David Gamez, 103–15. London: Continuum. Kitcher, Philip. 2011. “Philosophy Inside Out.” Metaphilosophy 42, no. 3:248–60. Wiley Online Library | Web of Science® Times Cited: 17 Kornblith, Hilary. 2010. “Belief in the Face of Controversy.” In Disagreement, edited by Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield, 29–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossRef Lamont, Michèle. 2009. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. CrossRef Leiter, Brian. 2008. “The State of the Vocation.” Philosopher's Magazine (1st quarter): 27–29. CrossRef Lycan, William G. 1996. “Bealer on the Possibility of Philosophical Knowledge.” Philosophical Studies 81:143–50. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 4 MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1995. “The Relationship of Philosophy to Its Past.” In Philosophy in History, edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, 31–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magee, Bryan. 1982. Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mandt, A. J. 1991. “The Inevitability of Pluralism: Philosophical Practice and Philosophical Expertise.” In The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? edited by Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, 77–101. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. Mason, Jeffrey A. 1989. Philosophical Rhetoric: The Function of Indirection in Philosophical Writing. London: Routledge. Mason, Jeffrey A. 1999. The Philosopher's Address: Writing and the Perception of Philosophy. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. McNaughton, David. 2009. “Why Is so Much Philosophy so Tedious?” Florida Philosophical Review 11, no. 1:1–13. Morrow, D. R., and C. A. Sula. 2011. “Naturalized Metaphilosophy.” Synthese 182:297–313. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 1 Nolan, Daniel. 2007. “Contemporary Metaphysicians and Their Traditions.” Philosophical Topics 35, nos. 1−2:1–18. CrossRef Norris, Christopher. 2012. “Philosophy, Inc.” Philosophy Now 92:9–12. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1992. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, D. Z. 1993. Wittgenstein and Religion. New York: St. Martin's Press. CrossRef Plant, Bob. 2012a. “Philosophical Diversity and Disagreement.” Metaphilosophy 43, no. 5:567–91. Wiley Online Library | Web of Science® Plant, Bob. 2012b. “This Strange Institution Called ‘Philosophy’: Derrida and the Primacy of Metaphilosophy.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 38, no. 3:257–88. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 1 Plantinga, Alvin. 1984. “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3:253–71. CrossRef Putnam, Hilary (with Giovanna Borradori). 1994. “Between the New Left and Judaism.” In The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, 55–69. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rescher, Nicholas. 1978. “Philosophical Disagreement: An Essay Towards Orientational Pluralism in Metaphilosophy.” Review of Metaphysics 32, no. 2:217–51. Web of Science® Times Cited: 9 Rescher, Nicholas. 1985. The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rescher, Nicholas. 1993. “American Philosophy Today.” Review of Metaphysics 46, no. 4:717–45. Web of Science® Times Cited: 5 Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980). Sussex: Harvester Press. Rorty, Richard. 1990. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Rorty, Richard. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers. Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossRef Saul, Jennifer. 2012. “Women in Philosophy.” Philosopher's Magazine. Published online 23 January. Available at: http:/philosophypress.co.uk/?tag=feminism. Sayre, Patricia. 2004. “Philosophy as Profession.” In What Philosophy Is, edited by Havi Carel and David Gamez, 241–55. London: Continuum. Schacht, Richard. 1993. “On Philosophy's Canon, and Its Nutzen und Nachteil.” Monist 76, no. 4:421–35. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 1 Schrift, Alan D. 2006. Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. Oxford: Blackwell. Schrift, Alan D. 2008. “The Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 3:449–73. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 6 Sellars, Wilfred. 2014. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.” In Metaphysics and Epistemology: A Guided Anthology, edited by Stephen Hetherington, 20–26. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Sluga, Hans. 1998. “What Has History to Do with Me? Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy.” Inquiry 41, no. 1:99–121. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 9 Smith, Barry. 1991. “German Philosophy: Language and Style.” Topoi 10:155–61. CrossRef | Web of Science® Times Cited: 5 Stroud, Barry. 2001. “What Is Philosophy?” In What Is Philosophy? edited by C. P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt, 25–46. New Haven: Yale University Press. Unger, Peter (with Grace Boey). 2014. “Philosophy Is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Unger.” Available at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/philosophy-is-a-bunch-of-empty-ideas-interview-with-peter-unger.html. van Eck, Caroline A. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Caroline A. van Eck, James McAllister, and Renée van de Vall, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Inwagen, Peter. 2009. “Listening to Clifford's Ghost.” In Conceptions of Philosophy: Royal Institute of Philosophy suppl. 65, edited by Anthony O'Hear, 15–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 2010. The Responsibility of the Philosopher. New York: Columbia University Press. CrossRef Weitz, Morris. 1977. The Opening Mind: A Philosophical Study of Humanistic Concepts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williamson, Timothy. 2002. “On Vagueness.” In New British Philosophy: The Interviews, edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, 147–62. London: Routledge.  Related Content Articles related to the one you are viewing The articles below have been selected for you based on the article you are currently viewing. Philosophical Diversity and Disagreement Authors Bob Plant Published Date 5 October 2012 The Problem of Relevance and the Future of Philosophy of Religion Authors Thomas D. Carroll Published Date 15 January 2016 Carving Intuition at its Joints Authors Jason Schukraft Published Date 8 July 2016 PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF ITS HISTORY Authors ANDREW MELNYK Published Date 29 February 2008 Doing Philosophy in Style: A New Look at the Analytic/Continental Divide Authors N. N. Trakakis Published Date 28 November 2012 1 Introduction Few philosophers enjoy being asked “What is it you do?” Fewer still relish the follow-up question “What is philosophy?” Even if one is sufficiently confident to describe oneself as a “philosopher,” one invariably struggles to say anything plausible and informative when asked “What is philosophy?”1 Here we routinely sidestep the question, offer platitudes, or say things many other philosophers would reject as an adequate characterisation of what they do. Thus, in a recent survey of professional philosophers, philosophy was variously defined as the activity of thinking hard about fundamental questions, the attempt to make sense of ourselves and the world, an inquiry into what is true, the analysis of concepts, reflection on anything one happens to be interested in, an examination of those things we ordinarily take for granted, the love of knowledge, the search for wisdom, the process of clear and critical reflection, understanding what really matters, an inquiry into what is unknown, and an investigation into the meaning of life (Lack of meta-cognition and philosophical self-reflection by philosophy and philosophers!! See my articles on these issues: hare https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian/Papers And here https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian/Books and here https://independent.academia.edu/UlrichdeBalbian/Drafts ) (see Edmonds and Warburton 2012, xiii–xxiv). (Some of the survey's participants were unsure how to respond to “What is philosophy?,” two laughed, and one replied with a joke [xiv, xix, xxi].)2 It is striking just how unhelpful these responses are. Allusions to the “love of knowledge,” “search for wisdom,” and “pursuit of truth” are far from enlightening, for it is not as if historians, linguists, or chemists are less capable of saying wise and true things about their respective domains. And here philosophy faces a deeper problem—namely, what exactly is its proper domain? In Sellars's estimation, philosophers aim to “understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term,” including “such radically different items as … numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death” (Sellars 2014, 21). It is not surprising that Sellars is cited more than once in the aforementioned survey (see Edmonds and Warburton 2012, xvi, xxiii), for the great virtue of his formulation is its accommodation of a vast array of meta/philosophical views. This is a virtue because we tend to play down the diversity of philosophical practice, often reconstructing philosophy's history to suit our own current interests, procedures, and aspirations. (Indeed, we sometimes portray the history of philosophy as a chronicle of error and confusion.) But whatever the merits of Sellars's view, it is unlikely to enlighten those unfamiliar with what philosophers actually do. There are, of course, other ways of responding to the question “What is philosophy?” One might insist that philosophy is an activity rather than a body of knowledge. (Both, depends on the question you are asking) But not only is it unclear whether our predecessors would have recognised this characterisation of the philosophic enterprise (see Crane 2012, 22), being an “activity” is hardly distinctive of philosophy. (a specific kind of socio-cultural practice or activity- specify its characteristics, aims, purposes, functions, values, norms, principles, assumptions, etc) In any case, what sort of activity philosophy is permits a wide variety of answers. Part of the problem philosophers face when asked “What is philosophy?” is the essentialist form of the question itself (see Janz 2004, 106). For while it would be convenient to transform “the philosophical point of view” into an analytic truth “that would then determine what is and what is not philosophy” (Weitz 1977, 249), it is unduly optimistic to think that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for a “work of philosophy.” Just as we routinely underestimate the role individual temperament and group psychology play in the formation and sustenance of our meta/philosophical views (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 302–4), rarely do we seriously consider that what we think of as the “real” philosophical issues could ever become passé or no longer part of philosophy.3 But perceived “hot topics” (fashionable!!!) soon go off the boil, just as particular debates fall silent, not because the problems are solved or, once agreement about solutions is widespread, lasting consensus is attained. On the contrary, philosophical debates run their course without ever reaching substantive resolutions, only to re-emerge later in one guise or another (see Unger 2014). Likewise, despite the fact that the philosophical canon is a dynamic assortment of authors and texts, as philosophers we often struggle to imagine particular canonical figures ever becoming of merely historical interest. Indeed, talk of “the philosophical canon” obscures the fact that the status and influence of many philosophers have waxed and waned for different philosophical communities at different times. We might therefore characterise “philosophy” as a family-resemblance term, pertaining to a loose constellation of “overlapping traditions of thought,” with often very different “conception[s] of which texts are canonical and which inquiries are worth pursuing” (Crane 2012, 22). Indeed, as Crane suggests, understanding a philosophical tradition as a “collection of inter-related texts, rather than a body of doctrines or a distinctive technique,” might help to explain why “fundamental disagreement” (2012, 23, 32) is such a pervasive feature of philosophy (see Rescher 1978, 1985; Van Inwagen 2009; Kornblith 2010; Plant 2012a). Of course, to appreciate the diversity of philosophical practice one does not have to trawl through the annals of history. The pages of current journals, publishers’ catalogues, and conference proceedings abound with discussions of topics that seem eccentric to philosophers of different metaphilosophical persuasions. Indeed, as Rescher notes, there are countless academic societies “dedicated to the pursuit of issues, now deemed philosophical, that no one would have dreamt of considering so a generation ago” (Rescher 1993, 729). It is perhaps natural to consider the time and place (and other social, cultural, historical, personal, etc factors) we happen to occupy as having unique meta/philosophical (related) importance. But assuming that philosophy survives as a distinct discipline beyond the twenty-first century, (IF it does – it should realize that it is one form of theorizing and deal with that) we might reasonably wonder how much contemporary philosophical (fashions, fades and contemporary gimmicks) work our successors will judge to have been worthwhile, which texts and authors will achieve and maintain canonical status, and which issues and debates will become solely of antiquarian interest. While some of our currently perceived philosophical achievements may survive more or less intact, our immersion within specific philosophical sub-communities tends to obscure the fact that philosophy's future—including its future assessment of us—remains uncertain. So, offering a plausible and informative answer to the question “What is philosophy?” is extremely difficult. It is therefore unsurprising, not only that non-philosophers often have misgivings about the value of philosophy, but also that philosophers themselves are sometimes plagued by self-doubt. Glendinning thus cautions: “It's always a tricky moment for any philosopher to acknowledge that what you are doing, what you think might be worth doing, might just be a spinning in the wind or just a kind of doing nothing at all, or doing something very badly” (2002, 207; see also Vattimo 2010, 114–15). These sorts of worries should not be dismissed as mere expressions of metaphilosophical despair. On the contrary, the difficulty of responding to metaphilosophical questions is exactly as it should be, and sets philosophers apart from their colleagues in other disciplines. For the history of philosophy is a history of disagreements about both specific philosophical issues and the nature of philosophy itself. In this sense at least, philosophers’ aspirations seem inversely proportionate to their results, for there is no widespread consensus on what such “results” might consist in.4 It is therefore interesting to note that in two of the four multidisciplinary funding panels Lamont studied, “philosophy emerged as a ‘problem field’, seen as producing proposals around which conflicts erupt.” Specifically, a number of the panellists “expressed at least one of the following views: (1) philosophers live in a world apart from other humanists, (2) nonphilosophers have problems evaluating philosophical work, and they are often perceived by philosophers as not qualified to do so, (3) philosophers do not (self-cognitively and meta-cognitively) explain the significance of their work, and (4) increasingly, what philosophers do is irrelevant, sterile, and self-indulgent” (Lamont 2009, 64; see also 66). Lamont concludes: “[P]hilosophy's reputation as a potential ‘problem case’ is not helped by the fact that the discipline is defined by its own practitioners as contentious. Philosophers tend to approach each other's work with scepticism, criticism, and an eye for debate. Disagreement is not viewed as problematic; rather, it largely defines intelligence and is considered a signature characteristic of the culture of the discipline—with often disastrous results for funding” (69; see also 105). That “What is philosophy?” (is a question that could be interpreted and answered in different ways, depending on a number of factors for example: the institution, individual, academia and other social, cultural, historical, attitudinal, value, etc factors) is one of philosophy's most stubborn questions is not because philosophers happen to be more cantankerous or befuddled than historians, chemists, anthropologists, or mathematicians. Rather, it is part of the philosopher's task to question the nature and value of his own activities. For not only is “What is philosophy?” tacitly (THIS is essential to be done explicitly by meta- and self-cognition) in play whenever we are doing philosophy, being reflective about what philosophy is constitutes a basic philosophical responsibility. That is to say, “What is philosophy?” is not only a legitimate philosophical question, it belongs to philosophy in a way that, for example, “What is science?” does not belong to physicists, chemists, or biologists. While the latter do sometimes ask these reflexive sorts of questions about their respective modi operandi, only in philosophy are such “meta” questions part and parcel of the discipline (see Sayre 2004, 242–43). Indeed, even where we think it appropriate to begin philosophical inquiry is inextricably bound up with our more-or-less tacit metaphilosophical commitments. There are then at least three things that distinguish philosophy from other academic disciplines: (i) When the latter do examine their own background aims, assumptions, and methods (this is essential and every philosopher must do this and this is what meta-philosophy does) we commonly describe them as doing something “philosophical.” (ii) As previously suggested, there is no specific range of phenomena constituting the proper object(s) of philosophical inquiry. Accordingly, “What is philosophy?” is unavoidably one of philosophy's own questions. (iii) As philosophers we often pride ourselves on our ability to critically interrogate those things routinely taken for granted both in ordinary life and in other academic domains. What philosophers take for granted is therefore an unavoidable question for philosophers themselves (though perhaps not only for philosophers). Mindful of all this, deep and sometimes acrimonious philosophical diversity is only to be expected in a discipline that lacks shared aims, methods, communicative norms, and subject matter. It is also unsurprising that philosophy is often taught outside departments of philosophy, much to the chagrin of many professional philosophers. If “[p]hilosophy has a way of being at home with itself that consists in not being at home with itself” (referring to two totally different aspects or items concerning philosophi, doing philosophy and philosophers anxiety caused by their discipline) (Derrida 2001, 55), then metaphilosophy is poorly understood as one philosophical sub-discipline alongside others.5 This is not to deny that only a minority of contemporary philosophers would include metaphilosophy in their designated areas of specialisation, (MINE as this is how I naturally think, my socialization, my attitudes and conception of philosophy, my personality-type, etc) competence, or even interest. (After all, we generally prefer to go “directly to the issues” without a lot of agonised “navel-gazing” (really? Is it only original- and creative-thinking philosophers, artists, scientists etc who suffer from this anxiety?) [Couture and Nielsen 1993, 2].) Nevertheless, while the explicit question “What is philosophy?” arises relatively infrequently in the history of philosophy, how philosophers have variously practiced their trade reveals a great deal about what they took philosophy to be. And the same is true of contemporary professional philosophers. Let me be clear: my aim in this article is not to defend a thoroughgoing “institutional theory of philosophy” (see Harries 2001, 51), or indeed any particular theory of philosophy. I do, however, want to question the assumption that thinking seriously about what philosophy is means thinking about philosophy “in terms that are philosophical rather than sociological” (Sayre 2004, 243). It seems to me that sociological considerations (broadly construed) bear upon metaphilosophical issues in highly significant ways (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 297–98). Certainly, the social-institutional dimension of contemporary philosophy can sometimes be disheartening; there is, after all, no shortage of unbridled careerism, abuses of power, cults of personality, gender bias, intellectual bandwagon jumping, sexual harassment, and other vices. But this too might tell us something about how philosophers understand their own activities (self-reflection, meta- self, institutional, socio-cultural, sub-cultural, academic, department, school, movement and other forms of meta-cognition or the lack thereof) , and how particular metaphilosophical views are instilled, disseminated, and sustained. In the next section, therefore, I want to explain why philosophical institutions (philosophy departments, research centres, and so on) are not wholly “external” to philosophy proper (see Bourdieu 1983, 4). 2 Inside (intra, internal to the discourse, discipline, socio-cultural practice and/or to the institution/s) and /Outside (external to the institution, discipline and/or the discourse or socio-cultural practice of) Philosophy Plantinga invites us to imagine the following scenario. Having completed her first degree in philosophy, a Christian student decides to pursue a career as a professional philosopher. While attending graduate school she soon learns how mainstream philosophy is currently practiced, and what academic philosophers consider the pressing issues of the day: It is then natural for her, after she gets her Ph.D., to continue to think about and work on these topics. And it is natural, furthermore, for her to work on them in the way she was taught to, thinking about them in the light of the assumptions made by her mentors and in terms of currently accepted ideas as to what a philosopher should start from or take for granted, what requires argument and defence, and what a satisfying philosophical explanation or a proper resolution to a philosophical question is like. She will be uneasy about departing widely from these topics and assumptions, feeling instinctively that any such departures are at best marginally respectable. (Plantinga 1984, 255) (This and the following in the same vein are irrelevant – they express one restricted –ism, ideology, values, assumptions and ideas) According to Plantinga, however, Christian philosophers should not feel obliged to follow contemporary philosophical trends. For as Christians they will have their own salient questions, problems, and guiding presuppositions. Indeed, they will sometimes have to reject “currently fashionable assumptions about the philosophic enterprise,” including what are widely regarded as “the proper starting points and procedures for philosophical endeavour” (Plantinga 1984, 256). In doing this, the Christian philosopher is perfectly entitled to those background assumptions she brings to her work (see 256). After all, we each “come to philosophy with a range of opinions about the world and humankind,” and part of philosophy's task is to clarify these “pre-philosophical opinions” (268). Plantinga is not denying that Christian philosophers have something to learn from members of other philosophical sub-communities. Rather, he is encouraging Christian philosophers to cultivate greater self-confidence in pursuing their own philosophical interests in their own ways (see 255, 258, 268). Plantinga's focus on the concrete academic environments in which philosophers are trained and later employed is interesting. Unsurprisingly, however, this broadly sociological emphasis has provoked explicit metaphilosophical criticism. Phillips thus objects that, just as “[t]he nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question,” so too is “Can there be a Christian philosophy?” (1993, 223). Accordingly, he maintains, this question “cannot be answered by saying, ‘Of course there can be, and we have regional meetings to prove it’” (223). That sort of response would be misguided in its “attempt to answer, by an appeal to external considerations, what ought to be discussed philosophically” (223). Phillips's demarcation between what is inside and outside philosophy reflects a more pervasive desire among philosophers to keep “properly philosophical” questions uncontaminated by “contingent,” “external,” or “merely empirical” considerations. Indeed, this is part of a more general tendency of philosophers to forget that they are situated human beings, and thereby inheritors of (amongst other things) a specific historical, economic, and cultural context. And we need reminding of this seemingly obvious fact if we are to avoid confusing philosophers’ aspirations with the reality of philosophical practice. I do not want to paint an unduly bleak picture here. But as philosophers we do habitually underestimate that, for example, changes in the status, reputation, and influence of specific philosophical texts are formed and sustained by a variety of “external” contingencies. (Consider the fractious relationship between the so-called Analytic and Continental traditions. Although the nature of this alleged “division” remains contentious [see Glendinning 2006, 7; 2011, 71], it is surely relevant that studying the history of Western philosophy is central to many European education systems [see Gutting 2001, 382; 2011, 7–23]. For as Schrift notes, the orientation of twentieth-century French philosophy was shaped by which historical figures appeared on the agrégation exam in the late 1950s, when many of the prominent names in recent French thought were either students or just beginning their professional careers [see Schrift 2006, 188ff.; 2008].) Despite the fact that the history of Western philosophy is a history of particular texts with often very different aims, methods, styles, and audiences, philosophers often treat this as incidental to the real business of doing philosophy. This attitude is both reflected in, and perpetuated by, the sorts of expectations we commonly have of contemporary philosophers. In the next section, therefore, I want to consider those expectations pertaining specifically to communicative norms. 3 Communicative Norms For the most part, the contemporary professional philosopher is expected to present herself as a member of an established working community, with designated interests, competencies, and expertise in respected areas of the discipline. (Institutionalized forms, traditions, values and types of philosophical intersubejctivity. Make them explicit and investigate them and their implications and consequences. I wrote about this as well) Accordingly, one of her main responsibilities is to publish in the most prestigious—usually English-language—journals, and in doing so refer to recent literature in the relevant field(s). Here, then, the philosopher views her research (and wants others to do likewise) as contributing to particular, well-defined debates in which substantive progress can be made. Contemporary philosophy's preoccupation with producing short, often highly specialised journal articles thus manifests a conception of philosophers as what Danto terms “vehicles for the transmission of an utterly impersonal philosophical truth” (1984, 7). This, in turn, “implies a vision of philosophical reality as constituted of isolable, difficult but not finally intractable problems, which if not altogether soluble in fifteen pages more or less, can be brought closer to resolution in that many pages” (1984, 7). The journal article has therefore come to be seen as an “impersonal report of limited results for a severely restricted readership, consisting of those who have some use for that result since they are engaged with the writers of the pages in a collaborative enterprise, building the edifice of philosophical knowledge” (1984, 7). In Danto's estimation, all this renders most contemporary philosophy “abstract and distorted,” with few “tethers to human reality beyond the dubious intuitions alleged to be universal” (Danto 2001, 244). While philosophers once employed a variety of literary forms (dialogue, aphorism, meditation, confession, and so on), these are no longer viable modes of professional communication.6 The prose of most academic philosophy is (mistakenly, one of the institutionalzed norms of the philosophical, academic, professional discipline – irrelevant to creative, original philosophy and philosophizing) intentionally abstract, dispassionate, and detached in its attempt to (wrongly) mimic the languages of science and mathematics (see Nussbaum 1992, 3, 19; Rescher 1993, 723; Harries 2001, 53; McNaughton 2009, 1–2; Unger 2014). One feature of this dominant form of philosophical communication is the way it suppresses authorial individuality. Of course, how one evaluates this “loss of voice” (see Danto 1984, 7, 19; Nussbaum 1992, 20; Mason 1999, 119; Danto 2001, 241, 244–45) depends on one's other metaphilosophical commitments. Thus, according to Smith, Analytic philosophers have rightly distanced themselves from the “more literary associations of their discipline”—not least from any “aesthetic fascination with languages” (1991, 157). For most contemporary philosophers, language is either “merely an instrument” or a “pre-packaged object of investigation” (157). Unsurprisingly, in the wake of such stylistic modesty, there is little room for the philosopher to “manifest himself in his peculiarity as an author” (158). It is therefore reasonable to suppose that most academic philosophers would consider that the main objective of a philosophical education is to produce not engaging, imaginative, and eloquent writers but sharp, clear, robust arguers who can produce, defend, and critique well-defined theses (see Rorty 1982, 221). For not only is one's philosophical seriousness commonly judged on the basis of the perceived quality of one's arguments, it is particularly damning to accuse a philosopher of being unable (or unwilling) to argue. But while Smith judges the voicelessness of philosophical writing to be a virtue, there is no metaphilosophically neutral reason to share this view. Nussbaum, for example, criticises the prose of much recent philosophy, describing it as an “all-purpose solvent in which philosophical issues of any kind at all could be efficiently disentangled, any and all conclusions neatly disengaged” (1992, 19). In her estimation, “there is a mistake made … when one takes a method and style that have proven fruitful for the investigation and description of certain truths—say those of natural science—and applies them without further reflection or argument to a very different sphere of human life that may have a different geography and demand a different sort of precision” (19–20). And as Nussbaum proceeds to note, part of the problem here is the way increasing professionalization “leads everyone to write like everyone else, in order to be respectable and to publish in the usual journals” (20). (I return to professionalization in the next section.) It is not difficult to see why the desire for optimal intelligibility generates anxieties about more indirect, oblique, or literary modes of philosophical expression. But while most philosophers feel able to recognise clarity when they see it, exactly what it consists in remains elusive. It is not surprising that we often dismiss as intellectually suspect—if not patently unintelligible—those authors and texts with which we are merely unfamiliar (see Barnes 2008, 10–11). But then, extracted from their broader intellectual contexts, the writings of many philosophers would fail the test of modest “plain speaking” (see Culler 2003, 44–45).7 In any case, it is all too easy to defend the obscurities in those texts we judge to be grappling with deep philosophical issues, while accusing others of manifest nonsense. For how one distinguishes between philosophers who are legitimately demanding and those who are irresponsibly abstruse depends on our prior exposure to—and metaphilosophical sympathy for—particular authors, the sub-communities to which they belong, and the specific audiences they are addressing. As such, there is little reason to suppose that members of all philosophical sub-communities ought to be intelligible to one another simply in virtue of being fellow philosophers.8 Given the widespread assumption that the function of style is merely decorative, it is unsurprising that the writing of philosophy is of marginal interest to most contemporary philosophers. As Magee remarks: “If a philosopher writes well, that's a bonus—it makes him more enticing to study, obviously, but it does nothing to make him a better philosopher” (Magee 1982, 230). On this view, any philosophical work that could not be understood independently of its specific mode of presentation would thereby have failed to communicate in an appropriately “philosophical” way. But whatever the appeal of the minimalist, “self-effacing plain style” (Mason 1999, 31), we cannot assume that the form and content of all genuinely philosophical writing must be easily separable. Indeed, not only can “plain language” be seen as a particular style, embodying a more-or-less specific conception of what philosophy is, one might say that philosophers’ general disinterest in questions of style is itself “an expressive feature of philosophy” (van Eck 1995, 2). Here, then, we are not faced with a simple choice between either adopting a philosophical style or opting for no style whatsoever. (In fact, one highly effective way of entrenching communicative norms is to deny that they raise any questions of style [see van Eck 1995, 6].) If one sees oneself working in a community ( creative- and original thinking philosophers are not part of this academic community) of philosophical problem solvers, whose primary task is to contribute to specialised, well-defined debates, then some conception of “plain speaking” will likely be taken for granted. My worry here is not about the detached “voiceless” style per se but about the assumed obviousness that this is the way serious, bona fide philosophy ought to be done. Those who do not share the problem-solving conception of philosophical practice might reasonably feel the need to adopt very different communicative strategies. Varying degrees of stylistic experimentation might, for example, be seen as necessary by philosophers wary of the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, or those who see plain or “ordinary” language as a cause of philosophical befuddlement, or those who believe that the clearest of utterances are already metaphysically and/or politically loaded. It is only to be expected that readers unfamiliar with these more reflexive, even sometimes “playful” texts judge their authors to be less than intellectually serious. But then, of course, to other audiences, texts embodying the ideal of modest plain speaking will seem, at best, metaphilosophically naïve. 4 The Philosophy Industry Nussbaum's aforementioned concerns about philosophy's professionalization are not new. In the early twentieth century, James complained about the dreariness, over-technicality, and cultish appeals to authority of the younger generation of philosophers of his time (see 1920, 15–17). More recently, Stroud laments how increasing professionalization has “rendered much more of philosophy sterile, empty, and boring,” and how this is encouraged (explicitly or otherwise) by demands for “quantity of publications, frequency of citation in the professional literature, widely certified distinction in the profession, and other quantifiable measures of an impressive resume” (2001, 30). Cottingham likewise bemoans the “fragmentation of philosophical inquiry into a host of separate specialisms, and the associated development of swathes of technical jargon whose use is largely confined within hermetically sealed sub-areas,” which he believes “represents a disintegrated conception of philosophising” (2009, 254; see also Norris 2012, 9). Whether one agrees with these specific diagnoses, the continual demand for publications does facilitate a certain type of philosophical output—namely, short, narrowly focussed journal articles that make relatively minor moves in a current “live” debate. Indeed, it is reasonable to think that many philosophers primarily publish not because they have interesting things to say but because they recognise the professional expectation to publish. For some, no doubt, this expectation provides a motivation to find something genuinely interesting to say. But there is little reason to think that, as a general strategy, this engenders philosophical work of deep and lasting significance. For good or ill, then, philosophy has become an industry with “thousands of operatives” (factors and variables) and a “prolific and diversified range of products” (Rescher 1993, 722–23). If philosophy's professionalization constitutes “the fact that distinguishes the discipline of philosophy at the dawn of the 21st-century from the prior two millennia” (Leiter 2008, 28), then we should not underestimate the extent to which our differing conceptions of what philosophy is are shaped by concrete social-institutional features of everyday philosophical practice. After all, as professional philosophers, we routinely prioritise specific methods and forms of argumentation over others, draw on particular authors and texts, consider only some issues worthy of attention, adopt and endorse particular modes of oral and written communication. Likewise, operating within institutes of higher education, we decide which courses to offer our undergraduate and graduate students, which should be mandatory and which optional, which topics and authors can be safely ignored, and which are essential to maintaining philosophical integrity. (I return to integrity in the final section.) As Mason rightly notes, there is a “close connection between what philosophy is considered to be and the given curriculum of a philosophy department” (1989, 13). Through a variety of activities—including teaching, curriculum design, internal and external examining, conference organisation, refereeing articles, editorial and committee work—members of philosophy departments and research centres sustain metaphilosophical norms throughout a population of students, teachers, and researchers. In promoting their philosophical merchandise to the wider academic world, these institutions compete for international prestige and funding. And, of course, these institutions are seen to possess the requisite expertise and authority to evaluate the intellectual competences and potential of students and professional practitioners by means of peer review, teaching assessments, and research evaluation exercises. There are, no doubt, many things that bind a philosophical community together; a shared collection of texts, salient issues, preferred methods, forms of argument, and modes of communication play a crucial part in this. But members of philosophical communities also share “professional familiarity rooted in meetings and seminars attended together, journals read in common,” extra-curricula socialising, and myriad other seemingly external factors. It would therefore be mistaken to think that “these so-called extra-philosophical factors have no direct bearing on what philosophers think” (Mandt 1991, 99)—including, of course, what philosophers think philosophy is and should be. While there is much to say both for and against the philosophy industry,9 it is not my aim to weigh the relative costs and benefits of philosophy's professionalization. I simply want to highlight how much of what we—a “we” that is always more or less local and transient—consider to be philosophy is formed and sustained by a host of contingent background conditions. Accordingly, what lies, respectively, inside and outside philosophy cannot, in good metaphilosophical conscience, be taken for granted. Although immersion in a particular philosophical sub-community is near unavoidable, our subsequent tendency to lose critical distance on our mundane philosophical practice is worth reflecting on. For this immersion diminishes our ability and willingness to see how the borders of philosophy, for historical, economic, cultural, and professional reasons, have changed. We therefore need to take seriously the variety of “external” factors that shape our understanding of what philosophy is. Mindful of this, let me return to the question with which I began: “What is philosophy?” 5 Is That Philosophy? (original- and creative-thinking philosophers represent philosophy, not the derivative, secondary, minor, academic professionals!!!) Thus far I have argued that social-institutional factors play an important, albeit often neglected, role in the formation, development, and sustenance of individual philosophers and the sub-communities to which they belong. Accordingly, these broadly sociological considerations ought to figure more prominently in metaphilosophical inquiry. Because the background conditions of everyday philosophical practice are not wholly external to the philosophical issues philosophers concern themselves with, it is a mistake to ignore what causes particular positions, arguments, and methods to dominate—albeit temporarily (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 298, 301). As Gross reminds us, each professional philosopher “must decide which substantive areas of philosophy to specialize in” and thereby “select one or more intellectual traditions in which to situate their work” (1984, 53). After all, these sub-communities “help define the kind of intellectual problem thinkers see as significant, the style and approach of their solutions to those problems, and the range of other thinkers with whom they are ‘in conversation’” (53). Of course, most often we do not consciously choose an intellectual tradition in which to work but rather find ourselves already situated within particular philosophical sub-communities as a result of numerous contingent factors—not least when, where, and from whom we received our philosophical training. Taking these social-institutional factors into account thus raises important questions about what is unreflectively embedded in our philosophical practice, including the more-or-less tacit agreement of group members regarding which topics, authors, and texts are worthy of transmission to the next generation of philosophers. In emphasising this, I do not want to trivialise the role played by rational persuasion and argument in ordinary philosophical practice. As I said earlier, I am not proposing a thoroughgoing “institutional theory of philosophy.” (After all, that the distinction between internal—philosophical—and external—non-philosophical—factors cannot be maintained with absolute precision does not mean that there are no workable distinctions available.) But we should not exaggerate the part that rational persuasion plays in philosophical practice, or indeed what argument can reasonably be expected to achieve. It would be pretty odd to think that philosophers are immune to sociological, psychological, and other “non-philosophical” forces. And while it is possible that philosophers qua philosophers are especially resistant to such “external” influences, this is an empirical claim, not something we can intuit from the comfort of our armchairs. It is important that we take seriously the sociological, biographical, psychological, and historical determinants of philosophical practice, not only because they form part of the metaphilosophical terrain philosophers actually inhabit, but also because we cannot assume that the question “What is philosophy?” must be answered in the abstract before it can be answered in the concrete (see Janz 2004, 106). In short, failure to acknowledge philosophy's entanglement in sociology, psychology, and history (among other things) can only hinder our understanding of what we are really doing when doing philosophy. As previously suggested, of the aforementioned background conditions that shape our meta/philosophical preferences and aversions, institutes of higher education in particular play a crucial role (see Nolan 2007, 2–3; Kitcher 2011, 259–60).10 Of his own graduate studies, Putnam recalls how he soon learnt “what not to consider philosophy,” as his training involved a more-or-less explicit process of metaphilosophical “narrowing” (1994, 57–58). Schacht likewise recalls how the guardians of orthodoxy of his early philosophical development “did not look kindly upon the interest of many of us in the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger”—indeed, even uttering their names “could get one in very serious trouble” (1993, 432). Desanti similarly recollects that for his generation of French philosophers, mathematical logic was simply not part of their heritage. As a result, Desanti and his peers struggled to “forge a relationship to mathematical logic for ourselves on the basis of what our tradition—which was basically historicizing—had already made of us” (Desanti 1983, 54–55; see also Bouveresse 1983, 10–11, 22; Engel 1987, 1). What interests me here is the general sense of “narrowing” Putnam refers to. For we should not conclude that exclusions and prioritisations of particular authors, texts, styles, and methods are a wholly negative or destructive part of philosophical training. Rather, this sort of “narrowing” plays an important role in sustaining philosophical communities. Let me explain what I mean. I said earlier that the question “What is philosophy?” belongs to philosophy because what philosophy is, is always an issue for philosophy. I now want to suggest further that “What is philosophy?” is better understood as the concrete question “Is that philosophy?”—a question particular philosophers (and groups of them) ask about particular authors, texts, issues, methods, and communicative norms. Understanding the question in this way captures important features of ordinary philosophical practice obscured by the more abstract formulation “What is philosophy?” The first thing to note here is that responding to the concrete question “Is that philosophy?” does not presuppose that we have an answer to the abstract, essentialist question “What is philosophy?” (see Janz 2004, 106). For answering the former is a practical matter that requires an ability (what I will call metaphilosophical “know-how”) to distinguish between what does and does not qualify as bona fide philosophy, what does and does not count as being of genuine philosophical interest, and so on. This know-how is acquired within, and sustained by, particular philosophical sub-communities. It is doubtless true that one's “awareness of belonging to a particular tradition comes with time” (Davidson 1994, 42). But what also comes with time is the ability to recognise “philosophy” when we encounter it. Early on in our philosophical training, most of us happily include works of literature, anthropology, and many other things under the umbrella term “philosophy.” But the more academic philosophy (and professional philosophers) we encounter, the sooner we come to see these as not being works of philosophy written by philosophers—whatever indirect philosophical insights they might offer. This practical skill of discriminating between bona fide philosophy and what falls outside its boundaries (or somewhere on the periphery) operates more at the level of engrained habit than rational reflection—though, of course, reasons can often be found after the fact. Nobody provides us with explicit metaphilosophical criteria to sort the philosophical wheat from the chaff. Rather, we gradually, and for the most part unreflectively, develop a sense of what properly philosophical texts look like, what sorts of topics are of genuine philosophical concern, what issues and debates are “live,” what institutions, authors, journals, and publishers are respectable, and what modes of expression are appropriate to serious philosophical work. For example, demarcating between so-called Analytic and Continental traditions does not require the ability to produce a checklist of defining characteristics for each (see Mandt 1991, 87–88; Sluga 1998, 107; Crane 2012, 22–23). All that is needed is the practical ability to distinguish between the sorts of books, journals, authors, communicative styles, and topics members of each favour—an ability acquired and sustained during one's training and everyday philosophical practice.11 We should not, therefore, be surprised that professional philosophers are able to recognise philosophy when they see it, though unable to provide widely acceptable criteria for their being able to, or to offer an informative and plausible response to the question “What is philosophy?” It is not that there are no standards in operation here; contemporary philosophy is not an anarchic free-for-all. Rather, metaphilosophical standards are embedded in local practice, and so feel entirely natural to those working within a given philosophical sub-community but at best optional to those working elsewhere. Before I conclude, let me briefly return to the question of meta/philosophical integrity. 6 Meta/Philosophical Integrity We often assume that our membership of “the philosophical community” ought to ensure a high degree of mutual intelligibility between us. As noted earlier, alongside our general intolerance for the unfamiliar, we tend to avoid metaphilosophical anxieties in order to go straight to the philosophical issues without detour or delay. All of this is perfectly understandable in what has become a highly competitive professionalised industry. As I have suggested, however, in all of this we are prone to trivialise the way sub-communities are “divided from the rest by different priorities as to what ‘the really interesting and important issues’ are” (Rescher 1993, 719). Immersed within specific philosophical sub-communities, we rarely ask whether there is such a thing as “the philosophical community” or if there is some underlying philosophical solidarity between us simply in virtue of sharing the same profession. (Even if philosophers share an “ineliminable backward reference to Plato's dialogues” [MacIntyre 1995, 45], how much metaphilosophical cohesion this actually sustains is unclear.) Of course, we should not over-dramatize the fragmentation of contemporary philosophy; philosophical sub-communities—including departments and research centres—are generally not discrete islands of intellectual activity (see Rescher 1993, 719). But neither should we forget that we rarely engage with philosophical communities much different from our own. Indeed, often we only become aware of their existence when confronted with conference announcements and book releases on topics we barely recognise as “philosophical” by authors we have never heard of. Given all of this, it is tempting to think that when one philosopher accuses another of not being a real philosopher, such charges are merely a “rhetorical gambit” (Rorty 1990, 370), demonstrating nothing more than the accuser's failure to appreciate the diversity of philosophical practice. Sometimes, no doubt, that is all there is to it. But these accusations are not always mere posturing. For as I discussed earlier, it is significant that the practical concerns of (for example) curriculum design and implementation manifest the desire of philosophers to draw disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries—not least between authentic and counterfeit philosophy. Identifying oneself as belonging to a particular philosophical sub-community inevitably involves the sort of “narrowing” Putnam speaks of. Sometimes, specific authors, texts, problems, methods, and communicative norms are openly ridiculed as “not real philosophy.” More commonly, particular authors and texts simply do not find their way into university curricula or onto the shelves of university libraries and bookshops. Either way, these exclusions are important to the extent that we identify who we are, philosophically speaking, by differentiating ourselves from those in other sub-communities. Williamson therefore maintains that for anyone who acknowledges certain “advances in philosophical standards” in recent Analytic philosophy, there would be a profound “loss of integrity involved in abandoning them in the way that would be required to participate in continental philosophy as currently practised” (2002, 151). If the implication here is that these are standards all bona fide philosophers should at least attempt to meet, then that seems a highly questionable bit of metaphilosophical stipulation. Still, Williamson's allusion to integrity highlights something of broader significance. For being a member of any philosophical sub-community presumably requires (i) a common heritage of recognised (by a certain institution, school, movement) authors, texts, issues, methods, attitudes and communicative norms, (ii) that this heritage be embedded in one's current practices, and (iii) a shared conception of what is possible for maintaining the future integrity of one's community. This third point is crucial. For at any given time some future possibilities will be significantly unthinkable for members of a particular philosophical sub-community. To exclude, inhibit, or even explicitly caution against specific authors, methods, styles (and so on) need not therefore be an expression of bare intellectual parochialism. Rather, respecting these perceived limits is part of what constitutes community membership.12 7 Conclusion Philosophers have never achieved widespread consensus regarding what philosophy is. Notwithstanding the fact that philosophers themselves sometimes talk of philosophy being in one “crisis” or another, and while the contemporary philosophical landscape is in many ways fragmented, philosophy has thus far managed to avoid total collapse. I have suggested, however, that philosophy's relative stability is not due to it possessing some essential core, a set of defining characteristics, or even a unifying genealogy. Rather, it is because members of different sub-communities congregate around specific collections of authors, texts, debates, and issues, and employ more-or-less unquestioned methods and communicative norms. In short, the boundaries of philosophy are secured locally by philosophers’ everyday activities. If that is right, then metaphilosophical inquiry needs to extend beyond questions of methodology and encompass the wider background conditions of philosophical practice (see Morrow and Sula 2011, 312). Acknowledgments Thanks to Joe Morrison, Gerry Hough, Paula Sweeney, and Carrie Jenkins for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Footnotes 1 I will assume that this difficulty does not arise because philosophy is uniquely demanding. 2 On what many contemporary philosophers believe, see Bourget and Chalmers 2013. 3 Recent discussions of women in philosophy (see Saul 2012; Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013) have started to open up metaphilosophy to sociological and psychological questions. 4 For extremely negative assessments of philosophy, see Lycan 1996, 149; Unger 2014. 5 On Derrida and metaphilosophy, see Plant 2012b. 6 Today, podcasts, blog posts, and tweets play an increasingly significant role in the daily practice of professional philosophers. 7 On the numerous “deplorable” styles in academic philosophy, see McNaughton 2009, 3–4. 8 Even when we understand what a philosopher is saying, we may not understand why she is saying it, or saying it in that particular way. 9 See Rescher 1993, 725, 727; Harries 2001, 52; Sayre 2004, 249; Nolan 2007, 12; Leiter 2008, 28; Saul 2012; Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013. 10 Sula's “Phylo” project (http://phylo.info/) usefully charts the web of influences—not least between supervisors and doctoral students—that shape an individual's philosophical profile. See also Healy 2013. 11 On a related point, see Rorty 2007, 120. 12 New members of a philosophical community cannot simply till the philosophical soil already laid. To “advance in the profession” one must find more-or-less novel and provocative things to say within the terrain mapped out by the generation who supervised one's doctoral work, and who now sit on the boards of funding bodies, promotion panels, research centres, and academic publishers. References Related content 78 78