Reply to Dennett, Knobe, Kuznetsov, and Stoljar on Philosophical Methodology

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-52
Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Armchair Philosophy

The paper replies to replies by Dennett, Knobe, Kuznetsov, and Stoljar to the author’s ‘Armchair Philosophy’.

Armchair Philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Armchair Philosophy

The article presents an anti-exceptionalist view of philosophical methodology, on which it is much closer to the methodology of other disciplines than many philosophers like to think. Like mathematics, it is a science, but not a natural science. Its methods are notprimarily experimental, though it can draw on the results of natural science. Likefoundational mathematics, its methods are abductive as well as deductive. As in the natural sciences, much progress in philosophy consists in the construction of better models rather than in the discovery of new laws. We should not worry about whether philosophy is a priori or a posteriori, because the distinction is epistemologically superficial.

scholarly journals Loose Constitutivity and Armchair Philosophy

2010 ◽  
pp. 177-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Weinberg ◽  
Stephen J. Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Work ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Armchair Philosophy ◽  
Brian Weatherson

Standard philosophical methodology which proceeds by appeal to intuitions accessible "from the armchair" has come under criticism on the basis of empirical work indicating unanticipated variability of such intuitions. Loose constitutivity---the idea that intuitions are partly, but not strictly, constitutive of the concepts that appear in them---offers an interesting line of response to this empirical challenge. On a loose constitutivist view, it is unlikely that our intuitions are incorrect across the board, since they partly fix the facts in question. But we argue that this ratification of intuitions is at best rough and generic, and can only do the required methodological work if it operates in conjunction with some sort of further criteria of theory selection. We consider two that we find in the literature: naturalness (Brian Weatherson, borrowing from Lewis) and charity (Henry Jackman, borrowing from Davidson). At the end of the day, neither provides the armchair philosopher complete shelter from extra-armchair inquiry.

Metaphilosophy: History and Perspectives

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-18
Author(s):  
Vadim V. Vasilyev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Common ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Armchair Philosophy ◽  
Separate Discipline ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

In this paper I discuss a prehistory of the recent metaphilosophical research and provide an overview of its most important areas. I review the ways of understanding of philosophy by the authors of the Early Modernity and contemporary continental philosophers and outline a trajectory of metaphilosophical discussions in analytic philosophy of 20th century. I try to show that the recent surge of metaphilosophy research in it could be explained by a search for a new identity of analytic philosophy after wide disappointment in the “linguistic turn,” as well as after criticism of Quine and his followers of various aspects of the common method of conceptual analysis, and expansion of the field of inquiry. I argue that contemporary analytic philosophy is much closer to the classical and modern tradition than to the early analytic philosophy. And the most important question for contemporary metaphilosophers seems to be a question about possible substitutes of an old-fashioned conceptual analysis. Some authors propose to get rid of armchair methods at all and follow experimental line of research. This, however, could be destructive to the philosophy as a separate discipline. That’s why it is important to pay utmost attention to those philosophers who try to save armchair philosophy. As Timothy Williamson is one of the most interesting authors working in this vein, I asses his role in the recent metaphilosophical research. I give a brief review of his book “Doing Philosophy” (2018) and draw attention to the fact that its main ideas are briefly expressed in his paper “Armchair Philosophy”, published in this issue of the journal. I claim that the importance of Timothy Williamson’s work is best explained by its role in realizing that philosophers now have to make a hard choice between dissolving philosophical methodology in methods of experimental sciences and trying to find way of justification of armchair philosophy.

Aboutness

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Library Science ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Made In

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.

Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and the Task of Phenomenological Explanation

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Dimitris Apostolopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Circular Structure ◽  
Phenomenological Reflection ◽  
Phenomenological Methodology

This paper provides an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s view of philosophical explanation. Some commentators stress his indebtedness to the transcendental tradition, but this influence does not extend to his viewof explanation. I argue that Merleau-Ponty gives up on the transcendental ideal of explanatory completeness, shared by Husserl and Kant. Motivated by a distinctive understanding of transcendental expression, he argues that phenomenological reflection, and the explanations that issue from it, must both have a circular structure if they are to provide a persuasive account of experience. This circular view of phenomenological methodology is further developed in later texts, which stress the openness and incompleteness of both reflection and explanation. Merleau-Ponty’s reliance on the concept of circularity testifies to the increasing importance of Hegel for his viewof phenomenological explanation and philosophical methodology.

Collingwood and Russell on Philosophical Method

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-52
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Lord
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
Dialectical Method ◽  
Logical Atomism ◽  
History Of

Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method provides an insightful critique of Russell’s analysis and metaphysics of logical atomism, proposing an unduly neglected neo-idealist alternative to Russell’s philosophical method. I summarize Collingwood’s critique of analysis and sympathetically outline the philosophical methodology of Collingwood’s post-Hegelian dialectical method: his scale of forms methodology, grounded on the overlap of philosophical classes. I then delineate Collingwood’s critique of the metaphysics of logical atomism, demonstrating how the scale of forms methodology is opposed to Russell’s logical atomism. Finally, I reflect on the reasons Collingwood’s Essay aroused little interest upon publication and the importance of continually rethinking the history of philosophy.

Indeterminancy, Ethnophilosophy, Linguistic Philosophy, African Philosophy

Philosophy ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 70 (273) ◽  
pp. 377-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Hallen
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
African Philosophy ◽  
Academic Philosophy ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy

This is a paper about philosophical methodology or, better, methodologies. Most of the material that has been published to date under the rubric of African philosophy has been methodological in character. One reason for this is the conflicts that sometimes arise when philosophers in Africa attempt to reconcile their relationships with both academic philosophy and so-called African '‘traditional’ systems of thought. A further complication is that the studies of traditional African thought systems that become involved in these conflicts are themselves products of academia– of disciplinary methodologies.

Intuitions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Philosophical Practice ◽  
Sources Of Error ◽  
Key Aspects

This article examines the philosophical methodology of intuitions beginning with an argument developed by Max Deutsch and Herman Cappelen over the descriptive adequacy of what Cappelen calls “methodological rationalism”, and their own preferred view, “intuition nihilism”. Based on inadequacies in both accounts, it offers a descriptive take on intuition-deploying philosophical practice today via what it calls “Protean Crypto-Rationalism”. It then describes the epistemic profile of the appeal to intuition, listing four key aspects of the basic shape of intuition-deploying philosophical practice: primacy of cases, flexibility of report format, freedom of stipulation, and interpretation-hungry. It also considers several sources of error for intuitions featured in at least the informal methodological lore of philosophy, namely: misconstruals, modal confusions, pragmatics/semantics confusion, and “tin ear”. Finally, it explores the problem of methodological ignorance and inferential demand, particularly the typical practices of philosophical inference that operate on the premises delivered by appeal to intuitions.

AQUINAS AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY

1970 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-317
Author(s):  
James F. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Methodology
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document