Analytic Philosophy: Its History, Science, & Logic

i when when thinking about what what to say today this morning I I happened to chance upon a book that I read many years ago which was Roger Scruton book on sexual desire published in 1986 I don't know if anyone knows this book but detect extremely interesting somewhat eccentric book and and there's a brilliant review of it which I recommend to anyone on that in the tls by Galen Strawson and Strawson says in his review that one of the dangers in writing about sex from a philosophical or theoretical point of view it's the danger of generalizing from your own experience and I think I was very very true very important point and very insightful in that particular context the I feel the same thing about talking about philosophy as a danger of generalizing from from your own experience and so that's my apology insofar as I'm going to give one fort I'm going to say now what I'm going to say is very partial and looked up from a particular perspective Alexis mentioned definitions definitions of philosophy of course definitions can mean many things the definition could just be as who are a one line thing you might find in a dictionary or it might be something more like a a real definition that gives the nature or essence of something and recently there was a competition on the philosophy bites website if you know these this this website would which has podcasts interviews with of distinguished philosophers saying all sorts of things and there was a competition to define philosophy and what this was like this competition was held on Twitter is to define philosophy in 140 characters and there's some very good attempts and the one I as one of the judges of this competition what I thought was the best was that philosophy is is the art of making simple things complicated and complicated things simple and I thought that was rather good but clearly wouldn't help to explain to anyone what philosophy was if they didn't already know I think this the the attempt to look for definitions is actually pretty idle and I think we shouldn't think in terms of defining philosophy but rather trying to say some illuminating things about it inspires a definition is needed I like Wilfrid Sellars definition of philosophy in philosophy in the scientific image of man which I have quoted on here where he says the aim of philosophy abstractly formulated is to understand how things in the broadest sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term so that is I think as true as it is empty and and but nonetheless I think it's true I think it's an attempt to make a sense of things and then people start disagreeing about what they which things they think can be made sense of in this way and also about what it is to make sense of things and that's where definitions end and I think controversy and debate begins and when we teach philosophy in in the UK style in the UK universities and in many universities in the United States and Australasia you teach philosophy by teaching problems and the image that you have is of a menu of problems or David Armstrong once called the philosophical examination paper and Armstrong said that there are some compulsory questions on the philosophical examination paper and some optional questions I I don't agree with this conception of philosophy as if there were problems there was just a menu of problems there was just as a word that the eternal platonic problems which just sit there waiting to be approached by each generation and I mean I do think I do think there are problems and other problems arise and problems arise specific times for specific reasons what there isn't is something like an eternal menu of philosophical problems which arise for all thinking people at all times I think that that's that's an illusion there isn't a philosophical examination paper whose questions do not change and apart from the Cambridge fry pots of course but now as he will know pretty much the same as it was you know four hundred years ago so I said that I don't believe in that conception of philosophy instead I think we have to see to have a realistic conception of of all the things that are called philosophy we have to think of philosophy as a tradition there was a series of traditions and has a tradition of thought with certain canonical texts and which and traditions are distinguished largely by by their canonical texts so that's my I mean that is not to say that there aren't that there aren't philosophical problems and that you shouldn't teach philosophy by telling people what the what these problems are and getting them to try and solve the problems but rather one one cannot see these problems as as it were platonic fixed for all time so that's my that's that's that's what I want to say about the notion of a philosophical problem at the moment so thinking about philosophy as as a tradition of thought I I will say a few remarks and make a few remarks about the tradition of thought with which I'm most familiar which is the tradition that's known as analytic philosophy and I want to make a few well I want to make four points really about about analytical philosophy and then I want to say something about the very important question of the relationship between philosophy and its history so by analytic philosophy or analytical philosophy I mean this this broad tradition of thought in mostly in English language and mostly written in English mostly in English speak from english-speaking countries starting sometime in the early 20th century and which is still around today and in fact is starting to in one way or another infiltrate philosophy in in other countries too notably in Germany where then now there are almost as many members of the German Society for analytical philosophy the gap as as there are of the German philosophical Association and so it's not essential to analytical philosophy whatever it is that it's done in English but most of it in the 20th century was done in English despite the fact that some of its leading originators did not write in English and so we immediately get into a into a problem of specifying necessary conditions and I'm not gonna bother with that because I'm going to say this is a tradition of thought when we know roughly what it is even if we don't know exactly and we know where it is but we even if we don't know exactly what its boundaries are some people do put forward necessary conditions for things being analytical philosophy sometimes it's said that analytical philosophy has some special relationship with logic and it's a philosophy that puts logic at the heart of its enterprise other people have said that it has some special relationship with language and thus with the systematic study of language or with the theory of meaning others have said that its philosophy that has a special relationship with science and that where it thinks of itself as theorizing about the results of science or Quine once put it philosophy of science is philosophy enough dismal vision of things if ever there was such a thing I apologized in the eye I want to and some people say that that finally that some people say that there's the the essential contrast is between analytic philosophy and something called continental philosophy and now I want to say none of these characterizations are actually accurate these are actually quite the relationship with science with logic and with language are actually quite marginal aspects of the tradition and they come into prominence of certain points in the history of philosophy but but none of these things are really essential as some of the spokespeople for analytic philosophy and have said and so that's what I'm got to say first I'm going to say something about about language and about logic and about science and about a little bit about continental philosophy and and but then I want to raise what seems to me to be a real and difficult question about the relationship between philosophy in its history and that's about to be my final point so first of all in language I say well anyone who who knows the work of Michael damnit or as an influential and philosopher of logic and language and Michael will know that Michael Dermott defends the view that somehow the study of language is what distinguishes analytical philosophy from other schools of philosophy and this is what damn it says in his book origins of analytic philosophy this is what distinguishes analytic philosophy in its diverse manifestations from other schools is the belief first that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language and second that a comprehensive account can only be so attained that's what Dom it says in his book origins of analytical philosophy now this is an incredibly narrow conception of what but both the task of philosophy itself is and also what the what the actual reality of analytical philosophy is and I mean if I'm right to say analytical philosophy as a tradition and I think that's unquestionable it's a historical tradition that has something to do with the so called revolt against idealism of of Moore and Russell in the late 19th century the central point of the result against idealism this that as I see it the point the point of which they they saw themselves Russell and Moore saw themselves as departing from the previous tradition was over the idea of absolute truth as an idea that proposition simply can be simply and absolutely true so is an opposition to to holism and the idea that truth could only come in degrees which was characteristic of of the British a galleons such as green and and Bradley and other that there are the followers like like McTaggart so the idea that reality is something that we cannot access and as such and that we cannot make a simple judgment which can be simply an absolutely true or false that that was the idea that bit Russell are more rejected and that idea has nothing to do with an analysis of language or an analysis of thought that Russell only got interested in language when he realized that so to speak he couldn't see through and the words that we speak directly to the nature of the proposition itself and so for those who know his theory of descriptions that's the whole point of the theory of descriptions you can't just read off what the nature of the objects of our thought are from the nature's of the words we use to describe them so we have to start looking at language a bit but this was kind of folk demure for Russell because he started off with a conception of judgment where what you're doing is you're relating yourself to a proposition which can be absolutely true or false and a proposition or some other kind of part of the external world so analytic philosophy didn't begin with the idea of an analysis of thought requiring analysis of language and dumb it has a tendency to trace this idea back to Frager not being expert on Frager I can't say what whether that's correct but it seems to me that if you looked at Frager not through dumb 'its lenses but through just say for example looking at the things that he wrote most about which might give an indication of what his central interests were then there's almost nothing about thought in frege's work and i in either in the sense of the proposition or in the sense i mean there's a famous paper on the thought of course but but it's it's not a central concern if you look at Frager is concerned with mathematics and we're basing mathematics on logic so it seems to me this is a it's a very strange view of analytical philosophy it doesn't capture the origins of analytical philosophy it doesn't capture other central parts of analytical philosophy like any of the normative or practical sides of philosophy which are certainly analytic in their own way nor does it capture what are the most interesting developments in the philosophy of mind with which doumitt is not very aware a very is very well acquainted with these developments of people who do not say that we haven't bought an account of thought must depend on account of language so that specific thesis and just take that as an example of a thesis where someone wants to I mean generalizing from your own case really is a little bit is that taken to to an extreme here I think and um its conception of analytic philosophy the book origins of analytic philosophy is very interesting book but not for what it tells you about analytic philosophy but rather what it tells you about dumb it I think and what he wanted to do I mean just in passing if people are interested in this what he wanted to do was distinguish he wanted to find originators great originators of the tradition and he wanted to see so-called continental philosophy is arising out of phenomenology and that phenomenology came from Husserl and hostile and Frager disagreed in their conception of how to give an account of thought that was that's the way dumb it sees sees it but this is some yeah this is interesting but but obviously simplistic and not true to the facts okay so that's I I don't want to treat the whole question of the relationship between language and its role in philosophy but I take that as as as an indication with where people can go wrong because they just think about things in terms of their own preoccupations similar things could be said about logic it seems to me logic is obviously historically very important to analytical philosophy because the who have whatever view have analytical philosophy you have to see Russell as one of the originators and one of Russell's main projects was to understand mathematics in terms of logic and so developing the calculus that he needed to do that had a big impact on on the history of of the subject and learning logic and the is part of every more and more analytical philosophy degree program I'd say logic is thought of in some ways as a tool but also as a subject matter in its own right I don't want to say anything about it being a subject matter in its own right and but I just like to say something about the idea that logic is a tool there is an idea which I think is more of a piece of ideology rather than something that's actually carried out in practice that logic has a central role in analytic philosophy in a way it hasn't done in other parts of philosophy and that you use logic to make what you say absolutely precise and now this can result in the kind of very very peculiar kind of garbled half symbolic half English Logies sentences that people want to sometimes translate their thoughts into sometimes for a good purpose sometimes for no purpose whatsoever except to show that they can use symbols and that they're there use symbols which shows that their knowledge is a knowledge of some technical subject I'm so six part it can be part of the rhetoric of analytic philosophy that people will use these symbols in order to formulate their claims sometimes it's essential sometimes you can only see a certain ambiguity if you lay it out in in its in logical form but most often it isn't in the book that he wrote in 1991 mark Sainsbury which is kind of textbook of logic and philosophy called logical forms mark st. Bree uses this word philosophical logic and and I'd like to dwell for a moment on this term philosophical logic and the the word philosophical logic according to Sainsbury was invented by Russell and but many students would have come across this word first of all because a classic anthology edited by Peter Strawson in the 1950s which contained a number of very last work worthwhile deep and lasting essays like dumb it says he on truth frege's essay on the thought and various other other things about what was called philosophical logic and at the beginning of the book Watson defines logic rather I think rather perversely as the general theory of the proposition and then he goes on to say that that logic has a Phyllis a formal part and a philosophical part he doesn't say what he means by formal part but the philosophical part he takes some have to be covering in this book philosophical logic if you didn't have the word philosophical logic you would look at the esses in that book and you'd say there's some things where your philosophizing about language or your philosophizing about the relationship between thought or language and reality say that in the question of truth or your philosophizing about the nature of reasoning and all these things it's hard to see one topic philosophical logic as covering all those those things and for myself I have as much understanding of the term philosophical logic as actually this is a remark made by the late Cathy Wilkes when she said she didn't like the term philosophical psychology because she didn't know didn't know what philosophical psychology was any more than she knew what philosophical chemistry was it seems to me the same can be said of philosophical logic there's such a thing as the philosophy of logic when you asked about what is deduction or what is validity would these of these philosophical ideas that logic gives rise to there's such thing as the philosophy of language but it's not obvious to me that philosophical logic is a kind of as it were an actual kind that's much my own prejudice my historical speculation which I don't have the I don't have the historical knowledge to back up was that and of course in Oxford all these these people who were behind this revit this the so-called revolution in philosophy of the fifties and and they all wanted to use the word logic because they said that what logic philosophy was was an analysis of the logic of our concepts so you get essays written on things like the logic of cause and the logic of the law and things like this so everything would have a logical analysis because they want to do you use the word logic because that's how they conceived of their subject matter but of course in fact they'd all studied great so they didn't actually know any logic so Austin I think was the only person who knew any logic in that in that period we then Jane had confirm exaggerating a little bit Jennifer whereas in Cambridge they all learnt logic and so they went so they had to invent this other notion of logic which was Phyllis off logic where they could make a are you're making a logical error they're in discussion whereas in fact there wasn't really anything to do with logic in the sense of you know say for example the system of Frankie or Mathematica that's a hype that's not entirely frivolous hypothesis but I think it's probably worth pursuing if you're interested in history of this subject in to them and actually there's a wonderful article in of all places radical philosophy I never thought I'd hear myself say that but there is a wonderful article in radical philosophy by Jonathan ray on Oxford philosophy in the 50s if you can ever find this it's really worth reading about why the Oxford philosophers of the 50s thought they had established a revolution but none of them could say what that revolution consisted in and say it's a very very interesting piece philosophical logic according to Russell and Sainsbury defines it says that Russell used the phrase to describe a program in philosophy that of tackling philosophical problems by formalizing problematic sentences in what appeared to Russell to be the language of the language of logic the formal language of principia mathematica and now if that's a program for philosophy then it's gone nowhere but it seems to me there's there's there's almost nothing I cannot think of one significant achievement in analytic philosophy which has been the result of formalizing a problematic sentence in the language of principia mathematica and that really seriously depends on that when you're told about these things sometimes you're told well actually what this what what logic does for you here what the what the system of predicate logic allows you to see is that you can talk about non-existent things because you realize that nothing isn't a name you can form it and when you realize that nothing isn't a name then and that something isn't a name but these things are quantifiers and you realize it exists is not and is not a predicate but it's a it's a it's a second-level front or or quantifier and once you realize all those things then all the problems of existence disappear now it seems to me that it's neither true that you needed logic to realize that nothing isn't a name it nor is it true that that the problems of non-existence disappear once you represent exists as a predicate as a quantifier rather than a first-level predicate or all these these things that seem like noun phrases may be all that they're syntactically noun phrases as quantifiers so and Alex Oliver actually has written a nice piece on this and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian society some years ago calls some some more remarks and logical form it is badly misunderstood of misunderstanding of of what what the problem was that you were supposed to be solving by appealing to a quantification in discussions of existence now I so I very much doubt whether there is a serious program of philosophical logic in Russells sense and in the sense that Sainsbury attributes to Russell here I think it's it can be part of the self-image of philosophers and can be part of the rhetoric it can be part of useful kind of dissing back disambiguation and logic itself raises important philosophical questions but in in no way is it is it central to philosophy any more than any more than say the attempt to express yourself as precisely as you can is central to philosophy then which of course it is but that's not a an account of philosophy in any case I think um you know lies as with dumb it's definition I mean I think this definition is theory of of analytical philosophy it can make no sense of the normative side of philosophy this as anyone who has has has had to wade through scandinavian work on downtick logic and realize that there are some there are some points there but it doesn't solve anything it doesn't raise any sort of any problems about the normative and so so my next opinionated assertive comments are going to be about science and the relationship between philosophy and science now I think there is one way of this way in which historically philosophy analytic philosophy was was related to science and that was in the the Vienna circle of the 1930s 20s and 30s and where the the philosophers of the Vienna circle had had a definite program for philosophy and which was based on the idea of verification and verification was understood in terms of what was done in natural science and they took themselves to be following that constrain in the Tractatus their many many more experts on the Tractatus than I'm not expert on the factors at all but I understand that this is somewhat controversial and on the grounds that one vicar Stein said everything that can be said is the the propositions of natural science he thought those were the uninteresting bits and the things that were interesting were the things that couldn't be said at all good and so I don't think it's central to Vick and Stein of the Tractatus that philosophy should be pursuing the methods of science to put it mildly and other people in this room know much more about this than I do though and I think there is one way in which philosophy is become a so analytic philosophy has become associated with science and that was in the reaction to the logical positivist program particularly when that when some of the leading logical positivists went to America and influenced the most influential American philosopher the 20th century who's that's willard van orman quine and Quine took his his a lot of his views about what philosophy was and its relationship with science from khanna and Quine certainly has a has a conception of philosophy which sees philosophy not just as continuous with science but as a kind of son thing rather at the subservient to science in in some in some way McQueen is not analytical philosophy so it's perfectly coherent to be an analytical philosopher and reject all Klein's works and empty promises as as I said in my confirmation anyone who's a Catholic will notice that you reject Satan and all his works and empty promises sir I reject coin I reject most of what coin says I'm an analytical philosopher and I reject most of the ideas of David Lewis who's one of Queens and main followers and bought some of Queens views to a sort of a reductio ad absurdum but one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century but I reject his his views so whatever analytic philosophy is it's not a it's not a collection of dogmas or doctrines it's not crying in naturalism and it's not David Lewis's metaphysics so there's no this there's no special connection between oh there's at this historical connection is very important and concerned to be to take take into account the discoveries of science and try and blend them with your view of philosophy but but philosophy is not a kind of science it's not essential to think that philosophy is the handmaiden of science as many analytic philosophers think that's a view within analytical philosophy it's not essential to the whole discipline as I see it what when I say the discipline I mean the tradition and I think and this does raise the question when people try and compare philosophy to to Natural Science this does raise the question of the the question of progress within philosophy and on whether philosophy is trying to achieve that the truth and that truth consider that progress consists in the accumulation of truth now that's a very difficult question on which I don't have anything very insightful to say it seems to me that that there is such thing as progress in philosophy in that philosophy when when you philosophize often you are attempting to find the truth about a certain subject matter well whatever's going on here it's not the same as what people are doing in natural science one of my favorites of recent essays on the nature of philosophy or the in particular in the relationship between philosophy in its history is the introduction to Peter Hilton's book on the origins of analytical philosophy Russell idealism in the origins of analytical philosophy and I've got a quotation here which I rather like which I'll read out and about something that distinguishes philosophy and science and Hylton said what should not be controversial is that philosophy is not progressive in the way that the Natural Sciences often are one basis for this claim is the undeniable fact that philosophers disagree with one another not occasionally or when a party is incompetent or when the discipline is a crisis point but routinely these disagreements moreover are not merely about the truth of a given question but also about such things as how the question is to be stated what will count as a satisfactory answer which questions are basic and which may comfortably left be left unanswered and so on this disagreement exists because we continue to tolerate such divergent views in graduate students whom we train and the colleagues whom we hire this tolerance is presumably not an adventitious fact that spit stems from some recognition that a reasonable and well-trained philosopher may disagree with us over some fundamental philosophical questions whereas a reasonable well-trained scientist may not disagree with his or her colleagues over the existence of crystalline spheres so this idea that disagreement is completely endemic run goes right to the bottom of the subject I think it's something that really does distinguish a philosophical inquiry particular from it from the inquiries in natural science where disagreements is not just about some the correctness of some particular theory of something but it could be about the viability of the whole enterprise so you could have a colleague in an academic philosophy department and we are talking about an an academic tradition here an academic philosophy department who believed that philosophy was impossible and that was something that could and and you could work with that person and you could they could try and convey their ideas to their students just as you conveyed your ideas about the possibility of philosophy you could have people who disagree about the nature of truth not not just in the way that they might think where the truth was you know absolute or relative or where the truth was objective or subjective or whether truth was a matter of thought or a matter of language or where the truth was in the world people could disagree about whether the concept of truth was was an a concept that we should be philosophizing about at all so one of my colleagues in Australia he says he has a fictionalist view of truth he thinks that truth is a fiction and we're just sort of taking this idea of fictional ism - you know rather nice in conclusion so it seems to me that these kind of disagreements are absolutely fundamental to the subject and some people might think that they're regrettable but I don't for a reason I'm going to come on to in a second it seems to me that thinking about that idea of disagreement and what disagreement actually involves is something that will if we have a realistic view of that then we might understand something that's essential to philosophy okay that's all I want to say that science let and I'd like to say something about briefly about the the idea of continental philosophy I mean it's it's customary among you know very sophisticated people to say oh I'll just dismiss Society of continental philosophy of Bernard Williams once said you know that classifying philosophy is analytical continental was like classifying cars as Japanese or four-wheel-drive you know these are just completely across classifications of no point whatsoever and I think what's true is that it's more it's it's more usual to group a bunch of thinkers together as all belonging to some school and all having something in common if you're less interested in their views and analytical philosophers will will say oh no no of course John McDowell isn't an analytical philosophy Vic and Stein isn't really an analytical philosopher he's got something more in common with the Continental style but it means I don't like that sort of stuff right so you put them in that bag and so those who am nothing analytical philosophy does have some some kind of historical integrity as a category it was part of a mission that certain people thought they had that it had something to do with analysis of concepts it had something to do with logic all these ideas every neighborhood wants someone that's saying who solves an analytical philosopher at least early who soul is an analytical philosopher lake or saw wasn't as early herself was a realist realism is essential try a little closer and see how come we're doesn't be essential to analytical philosophy John McDowell is an analytic philosophy he's an idealist so where does all this clearly if anyone was an analytical philosopher in the past it was Bishop Berkeley he was clear the clearest analytical philosopher that there ever was but you know he wasn't a realist so I suppose what I'm saying is that these the catechist categories are pretty useless and the category of continental philosophy is pretty useless and I'd rather I think would that be better if we didn't use it I think we were better if let me give you an example and of the sort of way in which things can go wrong if you think in if you if you think of aligning yourself with a tradition rather than thinking about the subject matter itself and I was giving a lecture in in good and it was about the representation of the non-existent and I quoted there's a famous passage from Versailles logical investigations where he talks about the god Jupiter being something that's not to be found in any in any analysis of my thought the god Jupiter isn't here he's arguing against brentano's view that the object of thought was always integral to the thought that thought was always a relation to an object those are Philosopher's in the audience who said to me and that this can't be the this can't be a phenomenological view to be concerned with questions of non-existence because from the phenomenological point of view all the objects of thought are there I saw well that's of course right because you think if you think that there's such a thing as Vulcan and then of course it seems to you that Vulcans there but Vulcan doesn't exist and she said well you can't say that phenomenologist won't let you say that and I'll say well the cell says it well that wasn't the phenomenological part of what cells thought you see same as someone and she said as someone in the phenomenological tradition I can't accept your problem so this seems to me like aligning yourself with the tradition is just a way of saying I'm not going to take that question seriously and and of course you don't have to take every question seriously because you might think it's based on a presupposition that you think is is wrong and but but the presupposition cannot be that you're an analytical philosopher and I'm a continental philosopher or that you're I'm a phenomenologist and you're a logical positivist that's not that seems to me to me knocked out addressing the subject matter directly the term continental philosophy I found this out from silent which this nice little book on on continental philosophy a very short introduction the earliest use of the term continental philosophy is from Mills essay on Bentham were more work to F is in the 1839 1841 bent from one on Coleridge Coleridge for him was the paradigm of a continental philosopher Bentham was the paradigm of an English philosopher which you can sort of you can sort of see why Bentham is dry and boring states the obvious and college is interesting and comprehensible and glamorous so it's it's a very interesting that this that this term was first used in in this way and Mill says in his essay on Bentham mill says all movements except directly revolutionary ones are headed not by those who originate them but by those who know best how to compromise between old opinions and the new the father of English innovation both in doctrines and institutions is Bentham he is the great subversive or in the language of continental philosophers the great critical thinker of his age and country he says there's a nice contrast he makes between Bentham and and Coleridge in his essay on ecology says by Bentham beyond all others men have been asked led to ask themselves in regard to any ancient or received opinion is it true and by Coleridge what is the meaning of it so contrast there between asking about the truth of some view and asking about its meaning or its its significance now this but this contrast is not the contrast between analytic and continental philosophy only in it sort of parody of those two two views and what Coleridge has according to mill which is which I which is the point I really want to take from this this discussion is a concern with the fact that people are thinking a certain thing being itself philosophically problematic so when you're given some piece of philosophical thought you're interested not just in the question of whether it's right or wrong but also in the question of why people are thinking that thing at all how would anyone come to think otherwise for example these and it seems to me this is a this is a question that sometimes neglected in in analytical philosophy and because of that it's actually hard very hard for them to make sense of what it is that they're doing and so for example for example Ben he says Bentham judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the result of his own inquiries and did not search very cautiously into what might be meant by the proposition when it obviously did not mean what he thought true with Coleridge on the contrary the very fact that any doctrine had believed both being believed by thoughtful men and received by whole nations or generations of mankind was part of the problem to be solved was one of the phenomena to be accounted for and Bentham short an easy method of referring all the selfish interests of aristocracies or priests or lawyers or some other species of imposters could not satisfy a man who saw so much further into the complexities of the human intellect and feelings so that's very interesting contrast and I think it's a contrast which will be common those who fail familiar to two people who know contemporary analytical philosophy those people who are prepared to think about why some idea is held by people and as opposed to merely as it were evaluating the ideas and seeing whether they conform to your own inquiries and this I think is the this distinction as it were but what Bernie Williams calls between you know first order inquiry and reflection on the inquiry and leads me on to my final point which is about the relationship between philosophy and its history and I think that um one thing that is most deadly in philosophy is what I what I'm going to call normal science so you know clear use this word normal science to describe science as it was normally ticking along when all assumptions are just all the fundamental assumptions are accepted and they're not challenged and people just work on problems set by those assumptions now as far as science goes and I don't have any comment on that it seems to me a very enlightening description of a certain kind of things that go on in philosophy there can be such a thing as normal science and and I think in some ways this is the death of philosophy what happens in when you have normal sciences when assumptions which are actually very controversial assumptions which are you know contingently related to some particular course of events or debate but just depended on the that some very influential or brilliant writers become taken as if they are the only ways to proceed with certain problems and that that's what I call normal science and philosophy so and it becomes a kind of scholasticism so we all know it when you see it that you think people are just working through some detail of some problem set by maybe you know many decades ago a very exciting idea but has now just become going through the motions of something very dreary and now I think the difficult the difficult thing is here is that if you're going to make progress in understanding these these these questions these complicated philosophical questions you have to break things down into parts and you can't generalize you can't start safe your drinks if someone was doing a PhD thesis you know the last thing they should do a PhD thesis is on the nature of philosophy particularly when they don't know anything about it and that often happens there are various research projects funded by the HRC at the moment on philosophical methodology and people write PhDs on philosophical methodology without ever having actually tried to get inside a philosophical problem and see how what but how to work it out in detail and so on the one hand working something out in detail ISM is a matter of breaking it down into the s'mores working parts in many cases not in every case but in many cases it is on the other hand this can give rise to scholasticism

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Science, History of Science, Epistemology, Bertrand Russell, John McDowell, Logic, Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Frege, Dummett, Realism, Experimental Philosophy, Holism, Coherentism, British Idealism, Intentionality, Empiricism, Conceptual Analysis, Positivism, Logical Positivism, Verificationism

Id: 6KBmjzwiAv4

Length: 43min 49sec (2629 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2015