Category: Metaphilosophy
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The Most Boring Philosophers
Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed, no subject is boring except to the bored who make it so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is…
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The Eliminativist/Reductivist Distinction: Three Further Examples
For Part I of this discussion, and the first six examples, see here. Recall that my concern is to show via a variety of examples that the eliminativist-reductivist distinction is useful and important and indeed indispensable for clear thinking about a number of topics. 7. Truth is warranted assertibility. Someone who makes this claim presumably intends…
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On the Utility of the Eliminativist/Reductivist Distinction
If we think carefully about examples such as the following, I think we can come to agree that it is useful to make a distinction between eliminativist and reductivist claims. The distinction is useful because it allows us to disambiguate claims that otherwise would be ambiguous. Roughly, the distinction is between claims of the form…
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What is Philosophy?
I found the following on Keith's blog. It is so good I simply must reproduce it here. The nearest thing to a safe definition of the word "philosophy", if we wish to include all that has been and will be correctly so called, is that it means the activity of Plato in his dialogues and…
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Is There a Place for Polemic in Philosophy?
An important question to which Feser applies his laser. 'Laser' is an acronym: Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation. I hope Ed won't mind if I make of his surname an acronym: Filosophical Erudition Sans Excessive Restraint.
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Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: An Aporetic Tetrad
It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist. A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist. A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations…
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Frondizi on the Philosophical Attitude
Risieri Fondizi's What is Value? An Introduction to Axiology, tr. S. Lipp (Open Court, 1963) has stood up well since its English debut over forty five years ago. What follows is a noteworthy metaphilosophical observation of Frondizi's: The philosophical attitude is basically problematic. He who is not capable of grasping the sense of problems and who…
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A Modal Aporetic Tetrad
Here is a four-limbed aporetic polyad: 1. The merely possible is not actual. 2. To be actual is to exist. 3. To exist is to be. 4. The merely possible is not nothing. Each limb is plausible, but they cannot all be true. The first three limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the fourth. Indeed,…
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Wrong Division of Philosophical Labor
The most important questions, the existential ones, should not be left to the sloppiest and least able thinkers. Equally, careful and rigorous thinkers should not confine themselves to unworthy or merely preliminary topics. For example, some of the best heads in philosophy work exclusively in the philosophy of science. But for a philosopher to be a…
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What is Philosophy? Some Contemporary Views
The question about the nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question: metaphilosophy is a branch of philosophy. And so one expects and finds a variety of competing answers. Here are some. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the quotations. My comments are in blue. I conclude with a brief statement of my own. Philosophy…
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Clarity is Not Enough
This scribbler has penned paragraphs which, upon re-reading, not even he could make head nor tail of. That is often a sign of bad writing. It can also indicate sloppy thinking. But it may also show a noble attempt to press against the bounds of sense and the limits of intelligibility. And if philosophy does…
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A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle
It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians. What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification. Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.) Plato and Aristotle! These are not…
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Philosophy is Inquiry not Ideology
(The following, composed 16 February 2005, is imported from the first incarnation of Maverick Philosopher. It makes some important points that bear repeating.) On the masthead of The Ivory Closet, now defunct: "Life as a Closet Conservative Inside Liberal Academia." From the post Liberal Groupthink is My Cover: My dissertation, which I'm still working on,…
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John Gardner on Fiction and Philosophy
John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, p. 225: . . . at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better — though slower. Philosophy by essence is abstract, a sequence of general argument controlled in its profluence by either logic (in old-fashioned systematic philosophy) or emotional coherence (in…
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An Escape From Reality?
If someone tells you that philosophy is an escape from reality, reply: "You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether philosophy is an escape from it." The point, of course, is that all assertions about reality and its evasions are philosophical assertions that embroil the objector in the very thing from which…