The Philosophy of Philosophy

Syzetesis, 2023

Philosophical Studies, 2009

The emerging of new practices in the domain of philosophy, motivated by the desire to philosophize, which is expressed by the wider public since a few years, leads us to ponder the nature of this philosophizing, perhaps, in part, to answer those who question the legitimacy of this recent popularization of the philosophical impulse. In order to better capture its manifold manifestations, the present work will approach this new phenomenon from various angles: from the angle of the attitudes, as astonishment or radicality (fundamentalism), for example; also, from the angle of the skills involved therein, like analysis or argumentation, or again like problematization and conceptualization. But, we will also discuss about dialectic, intuition, philosophical consultation and so on.

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.

Sapientia Journal of Philosophy, 2020

In this paper, we have elected to reflect on the question of what is the method of doing philosophy. This critique proceeds from a preliminary discourse on the various methods that have been deployed in doing philosophy in the past to a discourse on Bochenski's thought on what should be the method of contemporary thought. The paper, found out that such methods as the phenomenological, analytical, dialectical, hermeneutical methods amongst others have been used in doing philosophy, past and present. We have argued in this paper that while it is true that real progress in philosophy can only be guaranteed by an adequate method that is grounded in logic and semantics, there is no single universally accepted method of doing philosophy. Arising from our analysis of Bochenski's thought and insights from an intercultural perspective, the paper concludes that an authentic philosophical method is that which rest on phenomenological analysis, proceeds through analysis and must be guided logic. Such a method must also be complementary and not confrontational.

Philosophica, 1984

2020

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

Analysis

Synthese, 2018

This special issue (short: S.I.) is dedicated to the study of philosophical methodology. Until recently, the debate about philosophical methods in analytic philosophy primarily focused on the method of conceptual analysis, linguistic intuitions, thought experiments, and empirical methods. The result of an analysis of a concept is typically taken to be an explicit definition that consists of a list of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for its fulfillment. Yet, such a list is only a result of a conceptual analysis if it is true by virtue of the meaning of its parts and if this truth can be recognized a priori with the aid of linguistic intuitions (e.g., Grice 1958). We can test definitions by conducting thought experiments that enact the specified conditions (e.g., Mach 1973; Jackson 1998, ch. 2; Nimtz 2012). This method of conceptual clarification has been criticized in several respects. For instance, Willard van Orman Quine challenged one of its presuppositions, namely the analytic/synthetic distinction (Quine 1951). Hilary Kornblith argued that its aim of specifying individually necessary and jointly sufficient condition cannot be reached (Kornblith 2007; see also Chalmers and Jackson 2001). Longstanding debates about concepts like knowledge are thus rather a gimmick than fruitful philosophical work (Kornblith 2014). Lynne Rudder Baker aimed to show that empirical considerations are involved in seemingly a priori analyses (Rudder Baker 2001), and it has been debated whether conceptual analysis is knowledge expanding (for this debate see, e.g., Balcerak Jackson and Balcerak Jackson 2012; Balcerak Jackson 2013). In recent years, it has also been argued that conceptual analysis should not be carried out by individual philosophers. Instead, folk intuitions need to be elicited by means of quantitative research. Such arguments B Insa Lawler