[Review] Doing Philosophy by Timothy Williamson

Open Press TiU, 2021

This handbook is an open educational and open-ended resource for whomever is interested in philosophical thinking. Each of the chapters is open in the sense of freely available and accessible to everyone. You may be a student who wants to get some background on a specific philosophical sub-discipline. You may be a teacher who wants to assign introductory reading for students. You may be a layperson interested in reading an overview of philosophical thinking, written in a clear and accessible way. Each of you: feel free to browse, download, print and use the collection as you see fit. We believe that open access is the future and that academic philosophy as presented in this volume is of potential worth to many of you out there. In this open-ended handbook you find two kinds of chapters. First, there are chapters that provide a broad introduction into a specific philosophical sub-discipline, such as political philosophy, epistemology or metaphysics. As this collection covers most of the sub-disciplines currently taught at Western philosophy departments, you can legitimately claim that you have been introduced to Western ‘philosophy’ as a whole, understood rather canonically, after having read the entire handbook. Second, there are chapters that introduce slightly more specific topics or philosophical approaches. You will always be able to know the focus of each chapter by looking at its subtitle. The open-ended nature of this handbook, means that new chapters will be added in the future. We hope that philosophy will change and grow with time to become more diverse and inclusive and that this handbook will do so as well. We think of philosophy and its evolution as an organic process, as a tree that branches out in many different directions, adding new directions as it goes along. In this handbook, we organize the wide variety of topics that philosophers discuss into four main branches, which represent important subject areas that philosophers have covered.First, there is ‘thinking about societies’, which includes chapters that cover philosophical approaches to matters of obvious societal relevance. How should we organize our societies? How should we treat others? What exactly are cultures and what role do they play in a globalized world? This branch covers philosophical discussions, theories and views on what binds and divides us as societies and communities.Second, there is ‘thinking about humans’, which includes chapters that zoom in on people, the members that make up those societies. Is there something like human nature and what does that look like? How do human minds and bodies relate to each other? Are we free or not? This branch covers what one could broadly call ‘philosophical anthropology’: philosophical discussions, theories and views on what it means to be human.Third, there is ‘thinking about thinking’, which include chapters that focus on the ways in which humans can relate to the outside world. How can we come to know things about that world? What is truth exactly? What are the values and limits of scientific understanding? How do we reason and argue and how do we do so properly? This branch covers philosophical discussions, theories and views on how humans come to believe things about themselves and the worlds they live in. Fourth, there is ‘thinking about reality’, which includes chapters that investigate those worlds in more direct ways. Do things have an essence? What do we mean when we say that some things exist and others do not? How can language help us access the reality out there? This branch covers philosophical discussions, theories and views on the world we, as humans, find ourselves in. If you like what is on offer in this handbook, you can let us know on the website https://www.openpresstiu.org/ and register for updates, for example when new chapters are added. Consider each chapter as a first and stand-alone introduction to the exciting and thought-provoking world of a specific branch of philosophy. The same will be true of future chapters. Like the chapters already included, these future chapters will be accessible for readers without any specific prior knowledge. All you need is curiosity, an open mind and a willingness to think twice.

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.

Philosophical Studies, 2009

Philosophia, vol. 42 (2014), pp. 271-288., 2014

Can philosophy still be fruitful, and what kind of philosophy can be such? In particular, what kind of philosophy can be legitimized in the face of sciences? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions, listing the characteristics philosophy should have to be fruitful and legitimized in the face of sciences. Since the characteristics in question demand that philosophy search for new knowledge and new rules of discovery, a philosophy with such characteristics may be called the ‘heuristic view’. According to the heuristic view, philosophy is an inquiry into the world which is continuous with the sciences. It differs from them only because it deals with questions which are beyond the present sciences, and in order to deal with them must try unexplored routes. By so doing, when successful, it may even give birth to new sciences. In listing the characteristics that philosophy should have, the paper systematically compares them with classical analytic philosophy, because the latter has been the dominant philosophical tradition in the last century.

Questions and Philosophizing, 2021

There are many different kinds of questions. I have mentioned a few of them here- Philosophy: Aims, Methods, Rationale Paperback – 2018 by Ulrich de Balbian (Author) ISBN-10 : 1985719150 ISBN-13 : 978-1985719156 In this meta-philosophical study I commence with an investigation of Wisdom. I then continue with ane xploration of the institutionalization of the subject and the professionalization of those involved in it. Thien I show that philosophizing resembles and attempts to do theorizing. The 9 questions, etc of the Socratic Method and details of the Philosophical Toolkit occur throughout different stages of theorizing as one level and one dimension of it. Traditional philosophy is no longer viable, relevant and acceptable. It might be possible to continue doing philosophizing in traditional ways. It is possible to continue fabricating fictional realities in the manner of the Pre-Socratics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Husserl, Hegel, Plato, et al. It is possible to devise pictures of realities and depictions of human consciousness and cognition like Descartes or in the Kantian manner. One of the major issues with traditional philosophy is its lack of self-awareness, the absence of meta-cognition. This lack of meta-cognition of traditional philosophers leads to the creation of all sorts of questionable phenomena and fake problems. Traditional philosophy, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of sciences, religion, arts, etc are little more than the possibilities, limits and restrictions enabled and allowed by the philosopher's methodology, techniques and tools. It is most likely possible to envisage a project to devise a collection or synthesis of many alternative realities by means of the insights and theories of theoretical physics, mathematics, bio-chemistry, biology and other sciences, the depictions produced by the arts and pictures of realities presented by the humanities. If such a system of pictures of reality is philosophically relevant and meaningful is however another matter. It is possible to continue fabricating fictional realities in the manner of the Pre-Socratics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Husserl, Hegel, Plato, et al. It is possible to devise pictures of realities and depictions of human consciousness and cognition like Descartes or in the Kantian manner. Some of these questions, certain kinds of questions are relevant to philosophy, to the doing of philosophy or philosophizing. What are the aims of different kinds of questions? What are their objectives and purposes? How are their relevant to the doing of philosophy? How are they related to philosophizing? These are some of the topics that will be touched on, tacitly and explicitly, in this exploration. I travel through the exploration of concepts and their role in questions, how concepts can be viewed as interconnected and being interpreted as forming a system or set of ideas and being employed to devise a theory, good, bad or indifferent.

2011

This paper argues in defence of the thesis that philosophy (metaphysics) is the most basic and fundamental of all scientific knowledge and is presupposed by all systematic human inquiries. At the beginning of the history of knowledge, the paper opines, philosophy (Metaphysics) was the one and only science. Thus the questions asked by philosophers at that early stage, later became the property of different fields of knowledge and inquiry. The paper maintains that it was only after the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century that the lines of demarcation between areas of investigation became more obvious and more permanent. Since it is clear, from the above, that the so-called “exact sciences” are not the most basic and fundamental sources of knowledge, what they produce have to be scrutinized and be solidly established in the light of the vision of things entire, provided by a well grounded philosophy, the paper argues. Our justification therefore, the paper maintains, for ...

Journal of Humanities and Social Studies, 2016

The aim of this paper is to examine the nature, scope and importance of philosophy in the light of its relation to other disciplines. This work pays its focus on the various fundamental problems of philosophy, relating to Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology Logic, and its association with scientific realism. It will also highlight the various facets of these problems and the role of philosophers to point out the various issues relating to human issues. It is widely agreed that philosophy as a multi-dimensional subject that shows affinity to others branches of philosophy like, Philosophy of Science, Humanities, Physics and Mathematics, but this paper also seeks, a philosophical nature towards the universal problems of nature. It evaluates the contribution and sacrifices of the great sages of philosophers to promote the clarity and progress in the field of philosophy.

I lay out the general contours of the argument here, emphasizing, perhaps surprisingly, what I take to be the ethical significance of the book What is Philosophy? and philosophy more generally. I set the stage for a critique of analytic philosophy in later chapters.