Putting Logic in its Place - By David Christensen

Disputatio, 2008

This paper claims that what philosophy primarily does is interpret our notions, offer ways of understanding these notions that are not scientific in nature but not contrary to science either. The paper draws a distinction between conceptual analysis, a highly constrained enterprise that is supposed to bring to light what was in the concept all along, and the interpretation of notions, a creative enterprise that offers ways of understanding notions that were not already prefigured by the content of these notions-philosophy consists in the latter, not the former. It explains how these interpretations are justified and what the difference is between better and worse interpretations. The remainder of the paper is organized around three headings: philosophy and science, philosophy and language, and philosophy and progress. It claims that in philosophy there is no real progress, but that philosophy does move forward because the notions at issue are endlessly interpretable.

Synthese, 2014

In this paper I will argue that there is a bi-directional relationship between philosophy and meaning such that doing philosophy can change the meaning of terms. A rhetorically powerful work of philosophy that garners widespread interest has the potential to change how people use a predicate. This gives rise to three concerns. First, one's conclusion can become right in virtue of one doing a particularly good job arguing for it. Second, it may be implausible to take philosophy to be a primarily descriptive enterprise. Part of the job of the philosopher is to proselytize about the correct usage of a word. Lastly, and most worrisome of all, the age-old method of the dialectic, a centerpiece of the philosophical project for thousands of years, threatens to plunge a range of domains of philosophical discourse into incoherence.

dialectica, 1972

The present essay constitues a rejoinder to remarks made by Professor Bar-Hillel in an article published in the Carnap Festschrift. Acquaintance therewith on the part of the reader is here presumed throughout .

Philosophical Studies, 2009

In "Analisi. Annuario e Bollettino della Società Italiana di Filosofia Analitica (SIFA) 2011", edited by R. Davies, Mimesis, Milano and Udine, pp. 117-125 (with a reply by Timothy Williamson, pp. 135-137), 2011

Syzetesis, 2023

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 1997

One of the most striking features of twentieth-century philosophy has been its obsession with language. For the most part, this phenomenon is greeted with hostile incredulity by external observers. Surely, they say, if philosophy is the profound and fundamental discipline which it has purported to be for more than two millennia, it must deal with something more serious than mere words, namely the things they stand for, and ultimately the essence of reality or of the human mind (Gellner 1959 provides an amusing, if unsophisticated, example.)

Ethics-Society-Politics papers of the 35th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 2012

Wittgenstein famously insisted that philosophy, in order to reach clarity, must stick to everyday uses of language. In this paper I suggest that this does not lead to the proposal that clarity is dependent on affirming such uses of language. Rather, the notion of everyday is introduced as a way of locating the root-causes to our problems in philosophy, and further, as a way of urging us to understand that the search for clarity is bound to a search for moral self-understanding. It is also suggested that this leads us to acknowledge the possibility that everyday uses of language might be in need of transformation, that the way words are used in everyday contexts do not by themselves guarantee clarity. As in traditional metaphysics, we might need to be in rebellion against the everyday.

Routledge History of Philosophy Volume X, 1996