Contemporary Metaphilosophy. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Contemporary Metaphilosophy What is philosophy? What is philosophy for? How should philosophy be done? These aremetaphilosophical questions, metaphilosophy being the study of the nature of philosophy. Contemporary metaphilosophies within the Western philosophical tradition can be divided, rather roughly, according to whether they are associated with (1) Analytic philosophy , (2) Pragmatist philosophy , or (3) Continental

philosophy.

The pioneers of the Analytic movement held that philosophy should begin with the analysis of propositions.In the hands of two of those pioneers, Russell and Wittgenstein , such analysis gives a central role to logic andaims at disclosing the deep structure of the world. But Russell and Wittgenstein thought philosophy couldsay little about ethics. The movement known as Logical Positivism shared the aversion to normative ethics .Nonetheless, the positivists meant to be progressive. As part of that, they intended to eliminatemetaphysics. The so-called ordinary language philosophers agreed that philosophy centrally involved theanalysis of propositions, but, and this recalls a third Analytic pioneer, namely Moore , their analysesremained at the level of natural language as against logic. The later Wittgenstein has an affinity withordinary language philosophy. For Wittgenstein had come to hold that philosophy should protect us against

dangerous illusions by being a kind of therapy for what normally passes for philosophy. Metaphilosophical views held by later Analytic philosophers include the idea that philosophy can be pursued as a descriptive but not a revisionary metaphysics and that philosophy is continuous with science.

The pragmatists, like those Analytic philosophers who work in practical or applied ethics , believed thatphilosophy should treat ‘real problems’ (although the pragmatists gave ‘real problems’ a wider scope thanthe ethicists tend to). The neopragmatist Rorty goes so far as to say the philosopher should fashion herphilosophy so as to promote her cultural, social, and political goals. So-called post-Analytic philosophy ismuch influenced by pragmatism. Like the pragmatists, the post-Analyticals tend (1) to favor a broadconstrual of the philosophical enterprise and (2) to aim at dissolving rather than solving traditional ornarrow philosophical problems.

The first Continental position considered herein is Husserl ’s phenomenology. Husserl believed that hisphenomenological method would enable philosophy to become a rigorous and foundational science. Still, onHusserl’s conception, philosophy is both a personal affair and something that is vital to realizing thehumanitarian hopes of the Enlightenment. Husserl’s existential successors modified his method in various ways and stressed, and refashioned, the ideal of authenticity presented by his writings. Another majorContinental tradition, namely Critical Theory , makes of philosophy a contributor to emancipatory socialtheory; and the version of Critical Theory pursued by Jürgen Habermas includes a call for'postmetaphysical thinking'. The later thought of Heidegger advocates a postmetaphysical thinking too,albeit a very different one; and Heidegger associates metaphysics with the ills of modernity. Heideggerstrongly influenced Derrida ’s metaphilosophy. Derrida’s deconstructive approach to philosophy (1) aims at

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clarifying, and loosening the grip of, the assumptions of previous, metaphysical philosophy, and (2) meansto have an ethical and political import.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

a. Some Pre-Twentieth Century Metaphilosophy b. Defining Metaphilosophyc. Explicit and Implicit Metaphilosophyd. The Classification of Metaphilosophies – and the Treatment that Follows

2. Analytic Metaphilosophy

a. The Analytic Pioneers: Russell, the Early Wittgenstein, and Moore b. Logical Positivismc. Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Later Wittgensteind. Three Revivals

i. Normative Philosophy including Rawls and Practical Ethicsii. History of Philosophy

iii. Metaphysics: Strawson, Quine, Kripke

e. Naturalism including Experimentalism and Its Challenge to Intuitions

3. Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, and Post-Analytic Philosophya. Pragmatism

b. Neopragmatism: Rortyc. Post-Analytic Philosophy

4. Continental Metaphilosophy

a. Phenomenology and Related Currents

i. Husserl’s Phenomenologyii. Existential Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism

b. Critical Theory

i. Critical Theory and the Critique of Instrumental Reasonii. Habermas

c. The Later Heideggerd. Derrida's Post-Structuralism

5. References and Further Reading

a. Explicit Metaphilosophy and Works about Philosophical Movements or Traditions b. Analytic Philosophy including Wittgenstein, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Logical Pragmatismc. Pragmatism and Neopragmatismd. Continental Philosophye. Other

1. Introduction

The main topic of the article is the Western metaphilosophy of the last hundred years or so. But that topic is broached via a sketch of some earlier Western metaphilosophies. (In the case of the sketch, ‘Western’means European. In the remainder of the article, ‘Western’ means European and North American. OnEastern metaphilosophy, see the entries filed under such heads as ‘Chinese philosophy’ and ‘Indianphilosophy’.) Once that sketch is in hand, the article defines the notion of metaphilosophy anddistinguishes between explicit and implicit metaphilosophy. Then there is a consideration of how metaphilosophies might be categorized and an outline of the course of the remainder of the article.

a. Some Pre-Twentieth Century Metaphilosophy

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Socrates believed that the unexamined life – the unphilosophical life – was not worth living ( Plato , Apology ,38a). Indeed, Socrates saw his role as helping to rouse people from unreflective lives. He did this by showing them, through his famous ‘Socratic method’, that in fact they knew little about, for example, justice, beauty, love or piety. Socrates’ use of that method contributed to his being condemned to death by the Athenian state. But Socrates’ politics contributed too; and here one can note that, according to the Republic (473c-d), humanity will prosper only when philosophers are kings or kings’ philosophers. It isnotable too that, in Plato’s Phaedo , Socrates presents death as liberation of the soul from the tomb of the body.

According to Aristotle , philosophy begins in wonder, seeks the most fundamental causes or principles of things, and is the least necessary but thereby the most divine of sciences ( Metaphysics , book alpha, sections1–3). Despite the point about necessity, Aristotle taught ethics, a subject he conceived as ‘a kind of politicalscience’ ( Nicomachean Ethics , book 1) and which had the aim of making men good. Later philosopherscontinued and even intensified the stress on philosophical practicality. According to the Hellenisticphilosophers – the Cynics, Sceptics, Epicureans and Stoics - philosophy revealed (1) what was valuable and what was not, and (2) how one could achieve the former and protect oneself against longing for the latter.The Roman Cicero held that to study philosophy is to prepare oneself for death. The later and neoplatonicthinker Plotinus asked, ‘What, then, is Philosophy?’ and answered, ‘Philosophy is the supremely precious’( Enneads , I.3.v): a means to blissful contact with a mystical principle he called ‘the One’.

The idea that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, earlier propounded by the Hellenistic thinker Philoof Alexandria , is most associated with the medieval age and particularly with Aquinas . Aquinas resumed theproject of synthesizing Christianity with Greek philosophy - a project that had been pursued already by various thinkers including Augustine , Anselm , and Boethius. (Boethius was a politician inspired by philosophy – but the politics ended badly for him. In those respects he resembles the earlier Seneca. And,like Seneca, Boethius wrote of the consolations of philosophy.)

‘[T]he word “philosophy” means the study [or love – philo ] of wisdom, and by “wisdom” is meant not only prudence in our everyday affairs but also a perfect knowledge of all things that mankind is capable of knowing, both for the conduct of life and for the preservation of health and the discovery of all manner of skills.’ Thus Descartes (1988: p. 179). Locke ’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (bk. 4. ch. 19, p. 697)connects philosophy with the love of truth and identifies the following as an ‘unerring mark’ of that love:‘The not entertaining any Proposition with greater assurance than the Proofs it is built upon will warrant.’Hume ’s ‘Of Suicide’ opens thus: ‘One considerable advantage that arises from Philosophy, consists in thesovereign antidote which it affords to superstition and false religion’ (Hume 1980: 97). Kant held that ‘Whatcan I know?’, ‘What ought I to do?’, and, ‘What may I hope?’ were the ultimate questions of human reason(Critique of Pure Reason , A805 / B33) and asserted that philosophy’s ‘peculiar dignity’ lies in ‘principles of morality, legislation, and religion’ that it can provide (A318 / B375). According to Hegel , the point of philosophy – or of ‘the dialectic’ – is to enable people to recognize the embodiment of their ideals in theirsocial and political lives and thereby to be at home in the world. Marx’s famous eleventh ‘Thesis onFeuerbach’ declared that, while philosophers had interpreted the world, the point was to change it.

b. Defining Metaphilosophy

As the foregoing sketch begins to suggest, three very general metaphilosophical questions are (1) What isphilosophy? (2) What is, or what should be, the point of philosophy? (3) How should one do philosophy?Those questions resolve into a host of more specific metaphilosophical conundra, some of which are asfollows. Is philosophy a process or a product? What kind of knowledge can philosophy attain? How shouldone understand philosophical disagreement? Is philosophy historical in some special or deep way? Shouldphilosophy make us better people? Happier people? Is philosophy political? What method(s) and types of evidence suit philosophy? How should philosophy be written (presuming it should be written at all)? Isphilosophy, in some sense, over – or should it be?

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But how might one define metaphilosophy? One definition owes to Morris Lazerowitz. (Lazerowitz claimsto have invented the English word ‘metaphilosophy’ in 1940. But some foreign-language equivalents of theterm ‘metaphilosophy’ antedate 1940. Note further that, in various languages including English, sometimesthe term takes a hyphen before the ‘meta’.) Lazerowitz proposed (1970) that metaphilosophy is ‘theinvestigation of the nature of philosophy.’ If we take ‘nature’ to include both the point of philosophy andhow one does (or should do) philosophy, then that definition fits with the most general metaphilosophicalquestions just identified above. Still: there are other definitions of metaphilosophy; and while Lazerowitz’sdefinition will prove best for our purposes, one needs – in order to appreciate that fact, and in order to give

the definition a suitable (further) gloss – to survey the alternatives.One alternative definition construes metaphilosophy as the philosophy of philosophy . Sometimes thatdefinition intends this idea: metaphilosophy applies the method(s) of philosophy to philosophy itself. Thatidea itself comes in two versions. One is a ‘first-order’ construal. The thought here is this. Metaphilosophy,as the application of philosophy to philosophy itself, is simply one more instance of philosophy (Wittgenstein 2001: section 121; Williamson 2007: ix). The other version – the ‘second-order’ version of theidea that metaphilosophy applies philosophy to itself – is as follows. Metaphilosophy stands to philosophy as philosophy stands to its subject matter or to other disciplines (Rescher 2006), such that, as Williamsonputs it ( loc. cit ) metaphilosophy ‘look[s] down upon philosophy from above, or beyond.’ (Williamsonhimself, who takes the first -order view, prefers the term ‘the philosophy of philosophy’ to ‘metaphilosophy’.For he thinks that ‘metaphilosophy’ has this connotation of looking down.) A different definition of metaphilosophy exploits the fact that ‘meta’ can mean not only about but also after . On this definition,metaphilosophy is post-philosophy . Sometimes Lazerowitz himself used ‘metaphilosophy’ in that way. What he had in mind here, more particularly, is the ‘special kind of investigation which Wittgenstein haddescribed as one of the “heirs” of philosophy’ (Lazerowitz 1970). Some French philosophers have used theterm similarly, though with reference to Heidegger and/or Marx rather than to Wittgenstein (Elden 2004:83).

What then commends Lazerowitz’s (original) definition – the definition whereby metaphilosophy isinvestigation of the nature (and point) of philosophy? Two things. (1) The two ‘philosophy–of–philosophy’construals are competing specifications of that definition. Indeed, those construals have little content untilafter one has a considerable idea of what philosophy is. (2) The equation of metaphilosophy and post-philosophy is narrow and tendentious; but Lazerowitz’s definition accommodates post-philosophy as aposition within a more widely construed metaphilosophy. Still: Lazerowitz’s definition does requirequalification, since there is a sense in which it is too broad. For ‘investigation of the nature of philosophy’suggests that any inquiry into philosophy will count as meta philosophical, whereas an inquiry tends to bedeemed meta philosophical only when it pertains to the essence , or very nature, of philosophy. (Such indeedis a third possible reading of the philosophy-of-philosophy construal.) Now, just what does so pertain ismoot; and there is a risk of being too un accommodating. We might want to deny the title ‘metaphilosophy’to, say, various sociological studies of philosophy, and even, perhaps, to philosophical pedagogy (that is, tothe subject of how philosophy is taught). On the other hand, we are inclined to count as metaphilosophicalclaims about, for instance, philosophy corrupting its students or about professionalization corruptingphilosophy (on these claims one may see Stewart 1995 and Anscombe 1957).

What follows will give a moderately narrow interpretation to the term ‘nature’ within the phrase ‘the natureof philosophy’.

c. Explicit and Implicit Metaphilosophy

Explicit metaphilosophy is metaphilosophy pursued as a subfield of, or attendant field to, philosophy.Metaphilosophy so conceived has waxed and waned. In the early twenty-first century, it has waxed inEurope and in the Anglophone (English-speaking) world. Probable causes of the increasing interestinclude Analytic philosophy having become more aware of itself as a tradition, the rise of philosophizing of amore empirical sort, and a softening of the divide between ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy. (This

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article will revisit all of those topics in one way or another.) However, even when waxing, metaphilosophy generates much less activity than philosophy. Certainly the philosophical scene contains few book-lengthpieces of metaphilosophy. Books such as Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy , Rescher ’s Essay on Metaphilosophy , and What is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari – these are not the rule but theexception.

There is more to metaphilosophy than explicit metaphilosophy. For there is also implicit metaphilosophy.To appreciate that point, consider, first, that philosophical positions can have metaphilosophical aspects.Many philosophical views – views about, say, knowledge, or language, or authenticity – can haveimplications for the task or nature of philosophy. Indeed, all philosophizing is somewhat meta-philosophical, at least in this sense: any philosophical view or orientation commits its holder to ametaphilosophy that accommodates it. Thus if one advances an ontology one must have a metaphilosophy that countenances ontology. Similarly, to adopt a method or style is to deem that approach at leastpassable. Moreover, a conception of the nature and point of philosophy, albeit perhaps an inchoate one,motivates and shapes much philosophy. But – and this is what allows there to be implicit metaphilosophy –sometimes none of this is emphasized, or even appreciated at all, by those who philosophize. Much of themetaphilosophy treated here is implicit, at least in the attenuated sense that its authors give philosophy much more attention than philosophy.

d. The Classification of Metaphilosophies – and the Treatment that Follows

One way of classifying metaphilosophy would be by the aim that a given metaphilosophy attributes tophilosophy. Alternatively, one could consider that which is taken as the model for philosophy or forphilosophical form. Science? Art? Therapy? Something else? A further alternative is to distinguishmetaphilosophies according to whether or not they conceive philosophy as somehow essentially linguistic . Another criterion would be the rejection or adoption or conception of metaphysics (metaphysics beingsomething like the study of' the fundamental nature of reality). And many further classifications arepossible.

This article will employ the Analytic–Continental distinction as its most general classificatory schema. Orrather it uses these categories: (1) Analytic philosophy; (2) Continental philosophy; (3) pragmatism,

neopragmatism, and post-Analytic philosophy, these being only some of the most important of metaphilosophies of the last century or so. Those metaphilosophies are distinguished from one fromanother via the philosophies or philosophical movements (movements narrower than those of the threetop-level headings) to which they have been conjoined. That approach, and indeed the article's mostgeneral schema, means that this account is organized by chronology as much as by theme. One virtue of theapproach is that it provides a degree of historical perspective. Another is that the approach helps to disclosesome rather implicit metaphilosophy associated with well-known philosophies. But the article will bethematic to a degree because it will bring out some points of identity and difference between variousmetaphilosophies and will consider criticisms of the metaphilosophies treated. However, the article will notmuch attempt to determine, on meta philosophical or other criteria, the respective natures of Analyticphilosophy, pragmatism, or Continental philosophy. The article employs those categories solely fororganizational purposes. But note the following points.

1. The particular placing of some individual philosophers within the schema is problematic. The case of the so-calledlater Wittgenstein is particularly moot. Is he ‘Analytic’? Should he have his own category?

2. The delineation of the traditions themselves is controversial. The notions of the Analytic and the Continental areparticularly vexed. The difficulties here start with the fact that here a geographical category is juxtaposed to a morethematic or doctrinal one (Williams 2003). Moreover, some philosophers deny that Analytic philosophy has any substantial existence (Preston 2007; see also Rorty 1991a: 217); and some assert the same of Continental philosophy (Glendinning 2006: 13 and ff).

3. Even only within contemporary Western history, there are significant approaches to philosophy that seem to at leastsomewhat warrant their own categories. Among those approaches are ‘traditionalist philosophy’, which devotes

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itself to the study of ‘the grand [...] tradition of Western philosophy ranging from the Pre-Socratics to Kant’ (Glock 2008: 85f.), feminism, and environmental philosophy. This article does not examine those approaches.

2. Analytic Metaphilosophy

a. The Analytic Pioneers: Russell, the Early Wittgenstein, and Moore

Bertrand Russell, his pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein , and their colleague G. E. Moore – the pioneers of Analyticphilosophy – shared the view that ‘all sound philosophy should begin with an analysis of propositions’(Russell 1992: 9; first published in 1900). In Russell and Wittgenstein such analysis was centrally a matterof logic . (Note, however, that the expression ‘Analytic philosophy’ seems to have emerged only in the1930s.)

Russellian analysis has two stages (Beaney 2007: 2–3 and 2009: section 3; Urmson 1956). First, propositionsof ordinary or scientific language are transformed into what Russell regarded as their true form. This‘logical’ or ‘transformative’ analysis draws heavily upon the new logic of Frege and finds its exemplar inRussell’s ‘theory of descriptions’ (Analytic Philosophy, section 2.a). The next step is to correlate elements within the transformed propositions with elements in the world. Commentators have called this secondstage or form of analysis – which Russell counted as a matter of ‘philosophical logic’ – ‘reductive’,‘decompositional’, and ‘metaphysical’. It is decompositional and reductive inasmuch as, like chemicalanalysis, it seeks to revolve its objects into their simplest elements, such an element being simple in that ititself lacks parts or constituents. The analysis is metaphysical in that it yields a metaphysics. According tothe metaphysics that Russell actually derived from his analysis – the metaphysics which he called ‘ logicalatomism ’ – the world comprises indivisible ‘atoms’ that combine, in structures limned by logic, to form theentities of science and everyday life. Russell’s empiricism inclined him to conceive the atoms as mind-independent sense-data . (See further Russell’s Metaphysics, section 4.)

Logic in the dual form of analysis just sketched was the essence of philosophy, according to Russell (2009:ch. 2). Nonetheless, Russell wrote on practical matters, advocating, and campaigning for, liberal andsocialist ideas. But he tended to regard such activities as unphilosophical, believing that ethical statements were non-cognitive and hence little amenable to philosophical analysis (see Non-Cognitivism in Ethics ). But hedid come to hold a form of utilitarianism that allowed ethical statements a kind of truth-aptness. And hedid endorse a qualified version of this venerable idea: the contemplation of profound things enlarges theself and fosters happiness. Russell held further that practicing an ethics was little use given contemporary politics, a view informed by worries about the effects of conformity and technocracy. (On all this, seeSchultz 1992.)

Wittgenstein agreed with Frege and Russell that ‘the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be itsreal one’ (Wittgenstein 1961: section 4.0031). And he agreed with Russell that language and the world sharea common, ultimately atomistic, form. But Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus developed theseideas into a somewhat Kantian and actually rather Schopenhauerian position. (That book, first published in1921, is the main and arguably only work of the so-called ‘early Wittgenstein’. section 2.c treats Wittgenstein’s later views.) The Tractatus taught the following. Only when propositions depict possiblestates of affairs do they have sense. Propositions of science and of everyday language pass that test.Propositions of logic do not quite do so. They have the form necessary for depiction; but they depictnothing because they boil down to either tautologies or contradictions. Hence they are ‘senseless’ (in Wittgenstein’s original German: sinnlos). As to metaphysical statements – statements about, inter alia , themeaning of life and God, and statements of ethics and aesthetics – they are ‘nonsense’ (Unsinn). They tryto depict something. But what they try to depict is no possible state of affairs within the world. Wittgensteinconcludes that philosophy is ‘a critique of language’ that detects and expunges metaphysical talk (Wittgenstein 1961: section 4.0031). ‘[W]henever someone [...] want[s] to say something metaphysical’, oneshould ‘demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’(section 6.53). But there is a complication. Wittgenstein (section 6.54–7): ‘anyone who understands me

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eventually recognizes [my own propositions] as nonsensical, when he has used them–as steps–to climb up beyond them [...] He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. What wecannot speak about we must pass over in silence’. Still, Wittgenstein applies the honorifics ‘mystical’ and‘higher’ (section 6.42–6.522) to his statements about the limits of language and to various othermetaphysical statements, including ethical ones. In the case of these (‘mystical’/‘higher’) nonsensicalpropositions, the point of remaining silent about them is not to damn them but rather to leave their truthunprofaned.

Like Russell and Wittgenstein, Moore advocated a form of decompositional analysis. He held that ‘a thing becomes intelligible first when it is analyzed into its constituent concepts’ (Moore 1899: 182; see furtherBeaney 2009: section 4). But Moore uses normal language rather than logic to specify those constituents;and, in his hands, analysis often supported commonplace, pre-philosophical beliefs. Nonetheless, anddespite confessing that other philosophers rather than the world prompted his philosophizing (Schilpp1942: 14), Moore held that philosophy should give ‘a general description of the whole Universe’ (1953: 1). Accordingly, Moore tackled ethics and aesthetics as well as epistemology and metaphysics. His Principia Ethica used the not-especially-commonsensical idea that goodness was a simple, indefinable quality inorder to defend the meaningfulness of ethical statements and the objectivity of moral value. Additionally,Moore advanced a normative ethic, the wider social or political implications of which are debated(Hutchinson 2001).

Russell’s tendency to exclude ethics from philosophy, and Wittgenstein’s protective version of theexclusion, are contentious and presuppose their respective versions of atomism. In turn, that atomismrelies heavily upon the idea, as metaphilosophical as it is philosophical, of an ideal language (or at least of an ideal analysis of natural language). Later sections criticize that idea. Such criticism finds little target inMoore. Yet Moore is a target for those who hold that philosophy should be little concerned with words oreven, perhaps, with concepts (see section 2.c and the ‘revivals’ treated in section 2.d).

b. Logical Positivism

We witness the spirit of the scientific world-conception penetrating in growing measure the formsof personal and public life, in education, upbringing, architecture, and the shaping of economic and

social life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and lifereceives it. The task of philosophical work lies in [...] clarification of problems and assertions, not inthe propounding of special “philosophical” pronouncements. The method of this clarification is thatof logical analysis.

The foregoing passages owe to a manifesto issued by the Vienna Circle (Neurath, Carnap, and Hahn 1973:317f. and 328). Leading members of that Circle included Moritz Schlick (a physicist turned philosopher),Rudolf Carnap (primarily a logician), and Otto Neurath (economist, sociologist, and philosopher). Thesethinkers were inspired by the original positivist, Auguste Comte. Other influences included theempiricism(s) of Hume , Russell and Ernst Mach, and the Russell–Wittgenstein idea of an ideal logicallanguage. (The Tractatus , in particular, was a massive influence.) The Circle, in turn, gave rise to an

international movement that went under several names: logical positivism, logical empiricism,neopositivism, and simply positivism.

The clarification or logical analysis advocated by positivism is two-sided. Its destructive task was the use of the so-called verifiability principle to eliminate metaphysics. According to that principle, a statement ismeaningful only when either true by definition or verifiable through experience. (So there is no syntheticapriori. See Kant, Metaphysics , section 2, and A Priori and A Posteriori .) The positivists placed mathematics andlogic within the true-by-definition (or analytic apriori) category, and science and most normal talk in thecategory of verifiable-through-experience (or synthetic aposteriori). All else was deemed meaningless. Thatfate befell metaphysical statements and finds its most famous illustration in Carnap’s attack (1931) onHeidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics?’ It was the fate, too, of ethical and aesthetic statements. Hence the non-

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cognitivist meta-ethics (see Ethics, section 1) that some positivists developed.

The constructive side of positivistic analysis involved epistemology and philosophy of science. Thepositivists wanted to know exactly how experience justified empirical knowledge. Sometimes – thepositivists took a variety of positions on that question – the idea was to reduce all scientific statements tothose of physics. (See Reductionism .) That effort went under the heading of ‘unified science’. So too did anidea that sought to make good on the claim that positivism ‘served life’. That idea was that the sciencesshould collaborate in order to help solve social problems, a project championed by the so-called Left ViennaCircle and, within that, especially by Neurath (who served in a socialist Munich government and, later, wasa central figure in Austrian housing movements). The positivists had close relations with the Bauhausmovement, which was itself understood by its members as socially progressive (Galison 1990).

Positivism had its problems and its detractors. The believer in ‘special philosophical pronouncements’ willthink that positivism decapitates philosophy (compare section 4.a below, on Husserl). Moreover, positivismitself seemingly involved at least one ‘special’ – read: metaphysical – pronouncement, namely, the verifiability principle. Further, there is reason to distrust the very idea of providing strict criteria fornonsense (see Glendinning 2001). Further yet, the idea of an ideal logical language was attacked asunachievable, incoherent, and/or – when used as a means to certify philosophical truth – circular (Copi1949). There were doubts, too, about whether positivism really ‘served life’. (1) Might positivism’s narrow notion of fact prevent it from comprehending the real nature of society? (Critical Theory leveled thatobjection. See O’Neill and Uebel 2004.) (2) Might positivism involve a disastrous reduction of politics tothe discovery of technical solutions to depoliticized ends? (This objection owes again to Critical Theory, butalso to others. See Galison 1990 and O’Neill 2003.)

Positivism retained some coherence as a movement or doctrine until the late 1960s, even though the Nazis– with whom the positivists clashed – forced the Circle into exile. In fact, that exile helped to spread thepositivist creed. But, not long after the Second World War, the ascendancy that positivism had acquired in Anglophone philosophy began to diminish. It did so partly because of the developments to be considerednext.

c. Ordinary Language Philosophy and the Later Wittgenstein

Some accounts group ordinary language philosophy and the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein (and of Wittgenstein’s disciples) together – under the title ‘linguistic philosophy’. That grouping can mislead. All previous Analytic philosophy was centrally concerned with language. In that sense, all previous Analyticphilosophy had taken the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ (see Rorty 1992). Nevertheless, ordinary languagephilosophy and the later Wittgenstein do mark a change. They twist the linguistic turn away from logical orconstructed languages and towards ordinary (that is, vernacular) language, or at least towards natural(non-artificial) language. Thereby the new bodies of thought represent a movement away from Russell, theearly Wittgenstein, and the positivists (and back, to an extent, towards Moore). In short – and as many accounts of the history of Analytic philosophy put it – we have here a shift from ideal language philosophyto ordinary language philosophy .

Ordinary language philosophy began with and centrally comprised a loose grouping of philosophers among whom the Oxford dons Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin loomed largest. The following view united thesephilosophers. Patient analysis of the meaning of words can tap the rich distinctions of natural languagesand minimize the unclarities, equivocations and conflations to which philosophers are prone. So construed,philosophy is unlike natural science and even, insofar as it avoided systematization, unlike linguistics. Themajority of ordinary language philosophers did hold, with Austin, that such analysis was not the ‘the last word’ in philosophy. Specialist knowledge and techniques can in principle everywhere augment andimprove it. But natural or ordinary language ‘ is the first word’ (Austin 1979: 185; see also AnalyticPhilosophy, section 4a).

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The later Wittgenstein did hold, or at least came close to holding, that ordinary language has the last wordin philosophy. This later Wittgenstein retained his earlier view that philosophy was a critique of language –of language that tried to be metaphysical or philosophical. But he abandoned the idea (itself problematically metaphysical) that there was one true form to language. He came to think, instead, that allphilosophical problems owe to ‘misinterpretation of our forms of language’ (Wittgenstein 2001: section111). They owe to misunderstanding of the ways language actually works. A principal cause of suchmisunderstanding, Wittgenstein thought, is misassimilation of expressions one to another. Suchmisassimilation can be motivated, in turn, by a ‘craving for generality’ (Wittgenstein 1975: 17ff.) that is

inspired by science. The later Wittgenstein’s own philosophizing means to be a kind of therapy forphilosophers, a therapy which will liberate them from their problems by showing how, in their very formulations of those problems, their words have ceased to make sense. Wittgenstein tries to show how the words that give philosophers trouble – words such as ‘know’, ‘mind’, and ‘sensation’ – becomeproblematical only when, in philosophers’ hands, they depart from the uses and the contexts that give themmeaning. Thus a sense in which philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’ (2001: section 124). ‘[W]e must doaway with all explanation , and description alone must take its place’ (section 124). Still, Wittgensteinhimself once asked, ‘[W]hat is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you totalk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. [...]’? (cited in Malcolm 1984: 35 and93). And in one sense Wittgenstein did not want to leave everything as it was. To wit: he wanted to end the worship of science. For the view that science could express all genuine truths was, he held, barbarizing us

by impoverishing our understanding of the world and of ourselves.

Much meta philosophical flack has been aimed at the later Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy.They have been accused of: abolishing practical philosophy; rendering philosophy uncritical; trivializingphilosophy by making it a mere matter of words; enshrining the ignorance of common speech; and, in Wittgenstein’s case – and in his own words (taken out of context) – of ‘destroy[ing] everything interesting’(2001: section 118; on these criticisms see Russell 1995: ch. 18, Marcuse 1991: ch. 7 and Gellner 2005).Nonetheless, it is at least arguable that these movements of thought permanently changed Analyticphilosophy by making it more sensitive to linguistic nuance and to the oddities of philosophical language.Moreover, some contemporary philosophers have defended more or less Wittgensteinian conceptions of philosophy. One such philosopher is Peter Strawson (on whom see section 2.d.iii). Another is Stanley

Cavell. Note also that some writers have attempted to develop the more practical side of Wittgenstein’sthought (Pitkin 1993, Cavell 1979).

d. Three Revivals

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, there were three significant, and persisting, metaphilosophicaldevelopments within the Analytic tradition.

i. Normative Philosophy including Rawls and Practical Ethics

During positivism’s ascendancy, and for some time thereafter, substantive normative issues – questionsabout how one should live, what sort of government is best or legitimate, and so on – were widely deemedquasi-philosophical. Positivism’s non-cognitivism was a major cause. So was the distrust, in the later Wittgenstein and in ordinary language philosophy, of philosophical theorizing. This neglect of thenormative had its exceptions. But the real change occurred with the appearance, in 1971, of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls .

Many took Rawls' book to show, through its ‘systematicity and clarity’, that normative theory was possible‘without loss of rigor’ (Weithman 2003: 6). Rawls' procedure for justifying normative principles is of particular metaphilosophical note. That procedure, called ‘reflective equilibrium’, has three steps. (Thequotations that follow are from Schroeter 2004.)

1. ‘[W]e elicit the moral judgments of competent moral judges’ on whatever topic is at issue. (In Theories of Justice

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itself, distributive justice was the topic.) Thereby we obtain ‘a set of considered judgments, in which we have strongconfidence’.

2. ‘[W]e construct a scheme of explicit principles, which will ‘‘explicate’’, ‘‘fit’’, ‘‘match’’ or ‘‘account for’’ the set of considered judgments.’

3. By moving ‘back and forth between the initial judgments and the principles, making the adjustments which seemthe most plausible’, ‘we remove any discrepancy which might remain between the judgments derived from thescheme of principles and the initial considered judgments’, thereby achieving ‘a point of equilibrium, whereprinciples and judgments coincide’.

The conception of reflective equilibrium was perhaps less philosophically orthodox than most readers of Theory of Justice believed. For Rawls came to argue that his conception of justice was, or should beconstrued as, ‘political not metaphysical’ (Rawls 1999b: 47–72). A political conception of justice ‘stays onthe surface, philosophically speaking’ (Rawls 1999b: 395). It appeals only to that which ‘given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life [...] is the most reasonable doctrine for us’ (p. 307). A metaphysical conception of justice appeals to something beyond such contingencies. However: despiteadvocating the political conception, Rawls appeals to an ‘overlapping consensus’ (his term) of metaphysicaldoctrines. The idea here, or hope, is this (Rawls, section 3; Freeman 2007: 324–415). Citizens in moderndemocracies hold various and not fully inter-compatible political and social ideas. But those citizens will beable to unite in supporting a liberal conception of justice.

Around the same time as Theory of Justice appeared, a parallel revival in normative philosophy begun.This was the rise of practical ethics. Here is how one prominent practical ethicist presents ‘the mostplausible explanation’ for that development. ‘[L]aw, ethics, and many of the professions—includingmedicine, business, engineering, and scientific research—were profoundly and permanently affected by issues and concerns in the wider society regarding individual liberties, social equality, and various forms of abuse and injustice that date from the late 1950s’ (Beauchamp 2002: 133f.). Now the new ethicists, whoinsisted that philosophy should treat ‘ real problems ’ (Beauchamp 2002: 134), did something largely foreignto previous Analytic philosophy (and to that extent did not, in fact, constitute a revival). They applied moraltheory to such concrete and pressing matters as racism, sexual equality, abortion, governance and war. (Onthose problems, see Ethics , section 3).

According to some practical ethicists, moral principles are not only applied to, but also drawn from , cases.The issue here – the relation between theory and its application – broadened out into a more thoroughly metaphilosophical debate. For, soon after Analytic philosophers had returned to normative ethics, some of them rejected a prevalent conception of normative ethical theory, and others entirely rejected such theory.The first camp rejects moral theory qua ‘decision procedure for moral reasoning’ (Williams 1981: ix-x) butdoes not foreclose other types of normative theory such as virtue ethics . The second and more radical campholds that the moral world is too complex for any (prescriptive) codification that warrants the name‘theory’. (On these positions, see Lance and Little 2006, Clarke 1987, Chappell 2009.)

ii. History of Philosophy

For a long time, most analytic philosophers held that the history of philosophy had little to do with doingphilosophy. For what – they asked - was the history of philosophy save, largely, a series of mistakes? Wemight learn from those mistakes, and the history might contain some occasional insights. But (the line of thought continues) we should be wary of resurrecting the mistakes and beware the archive fever that leadsto the idea that there is no such thing as philosophical progress. But in the 1970s a more positive attitude tothe history of philosophy began to emerge, together with an attempt to reinstate or re-legitimate serioushistorical scholarship within philosophy (compare Analytic Philosophy section 5.c ).

The newly positive attitude towards the history of philosophy was premised on the view that the study of past philosophies was of significant philosophical value. Reasons adduced for that view include thefollowing (Sorell and Rogers 2005). History of philosophy can disclose our assumptions. It can show the

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strengths of positions that we find uncongenial. It can suggest roles that philosophy might take today by revealing ways in which philosophy has been embedded in a wider intellectual and socioculturalframeworks. A more radical view, espoused by Charles Taylor (1984: 17) is that, ‘Philosophy and the history of philosophy are one’; ‘we cannot do the first without also doing the second.’

Many Analytical philosophers continue to regard the study of philosophy’s history as very much secondary to philosophy itself. By contrast, many so-called Continental philosophers take the foregoing ideas,including the more radical view – which is associated with Hegel – as axiomatic. (See much of section 4, below.)

iii. Metaphysics: Strawson, Quine, Kripke

Positivism, the later Wittgenstein, and Ordinary Language Philosophy suppressed Analytic metaphysics. Yet it recovered, thanks especially to three figures, beginning with Peter Strawson.

Strawson had his origins in the ordinary language tradition and he declares a large debt or affinity to Wittgenstein (Strawson 2003: 12). But he is indebted, also, to Kant; and, with Strawson, ordinary languagephilosophy became more systematic and more ambitious. However, Strawson retained an element of whatone might call, in Rae Langton’s phrase, Kantian humility. In order to understand these characterizations,one needs to appreciate that which Strawson advocated under the heading of ‘descriptive metaphysics’. Inturn, descriptive metaphysics is best approached via that which Strawson called ‘connective analysis’.

Connective analysis seeks to elucidate concepts by discerning their interconnections, which is to say, the ways in which concepts variously imply, presuppose, and exclude one another. Strawson contrasts this‘connective model’ with ‘the reductive or atomistic model’ that aims ‘to dismantle or reduce the concepts weexamine to other and simpler concepts’ (all Strawson 1991: 21). The latter model is that of Russell, theTractatus , and, indeed, Moore. Another way in which Strawson departs from Russell and the Tractatus , but not from Moore, lies in this: a principal method of connective analysis is ‘close examination of theactual use of words’ (Strawson 1959: 9). But when Strawson turns to ‘descriptive metaphysics’, suchexamination is not enough.

Descriptive metaphysics is, or proceeds via, a very general form of connective analysis. The goal here is ‘tolay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure’ (Strawson 1959: 9). Those most generalfeatures – our most general concepts – have a special importance. For those concepts, or at least those of them in which Strawson is most interested, are (he thinks) basic or fundamental in the following sense.They are (1) irreducible , (2) unchangeable in that they comprise ‘a massive central core of human thinking which has no history’ (1959: 10) and (3) necessary to ‘any conception of experience which we can makeintelligible to ourselves’ (Strawson 1991: 26). And the structure that these concepts comprise ‘does notreadily display itself on the surface of language, but lies submerged’ (1956: 9f.).

Descriptive metaphysics is considerably Kantian (see Kant, metaphysics ). Strawson is Kantian, too, inrejecting what he calls ‘revisionary metaphysics’. Here we have the element of Kantian ‘humility’ within

Strawson’s enterprise. Descriptive metaphysics ‘is content to describe the actual structure of our thoughtabout the world’, whereas revisionary metaphysics aims ‘to produce a better structure’ (Strawson 1959: 9;my stress). Strawson urges several points against revisionary metaphysics.

1. A revisionary metaphysic is apt to be an overgeneralization of some particular aspect of our conceptual schemeand/or

2. to be a confusion between conceptions of how things really are with some Weltanschauung .3. Revisionary metaphysics attempts the impossible, namely, to depart from the fundamental features of our

conceptual scheme. The first point shows the influence of Wittgenstein. So does the third, although it is also (asStrawson may have recognized) somewhat Heideggerian. The second point is reminiscent of Carnap’s version of logical positivism. All this notwithstanding, and consistently enough, Strawson held that systems of revisionary metaphysics can, through the ‘partial vision’ (1959: 9) that they provide, be useful to descriptive metaphysics.

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Here are some worries about Strawson’s metaphilosophy. ‘[T]he conceptual system with which “we” areoperating may be much more changing, relative, and culturally limited than Strawson assumes it to be’(Burtt 1963: 35). Next: Strawson imparts very little about the method(s) of descriptive metaphysics(although one might try to discern techniques – in which imagination seems to play a central role – fromhis actual analyses). More serious is that Strawson imparts little by way of answer to the followingquestions. ‘What is a concept? How are concepts individuated? What is a conceptual scheme? How areconceptual schemes individuated? What is the relation between a language and a conceptual scheme?’(Haack 1979: 366f.). Further: why believe that the analytic philosopher has no business providing ‘new and

revealing vision[s]’ (Strawson 1992: 2)? At any rate, Strawson helped those philosophers who rejectedreductive (especially Russellian and positivistic) versions of analysis but who wanted to continue to callthemselves ‘analytic’. For he gave them a reasonably narrow conception of analysis to which they couldadhere (Beaney 2009: section 8; compare Glock 2008: 159). Finally note that, despite his criticisms of Strawson, the contemporary philosopher Peter Hacker defends a metaphilosophy rather similar todescriptive metaphysics (Hacker 2003 and 2007).

William Van Orman Quine was a second prime mover in the metaphysical revival. Quine’s metaphysics, which is revisionary in Strawson’s terms, emerged from Quine’s attack upon ‘two dogmas of modernempiricism’. Those ostensible dogmas are: (1) ‘belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths that areanalytic , or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths that are synthetic , orgrounded in fact’; (2) ‘ reductionism : the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logicalconstruction upon terms which refer to immediate experience’ (Quine 1980: 20). Against 1, Quine arguesthat every belief has some connection to experience. Against 2, he argues that the connection is neverdirect. For when experience clashes with some belief, which belief(s) must be changed is underdetermined.Beliefs ‘face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but as a corporate body’ (p. 41; see Evidencesection 3.c.i). Quine expresses this holistic and radically empiricist conception by speaking of ‘the web of belief’. Some beliefs – those near the ‘edge of the web’ – are more exposed to experience than others; butthe interlinking of beliefs is such that no belief is immune to experience.

Quine saves metaphysics from positivism. More judiciously put: Quine’s conception, if correct, savesmetaphysics from the verifiability criterion (q.v. section 2.b). For the notion of the web of belief implies thatontological beliefs – beliefs about ‘the most general traits of reality’ (Quine 1960: 161) – are answerable toexperience. And, if that is so, then ontological beliefs differ from other beliefs only in their generality. Quineinfers that, ‘Ontological questions [...] are on a par with questions of natural science’ (1980: 45). In fact,since Quine thinks that natural science, and in particular physics, is the best way of fitting our beliefs toreality, he infers that ontology should be determined by the best available comprehensive scientific theory.In that sense, metaphysics is ‘the metaphysics of science’ (Glock 2003a: 30).

Is the metaphysics of science actually only science? Quine asserts that ‘it is only within science itself, andnot in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described’ (1981: 21). Yet he does leave a job for the philosopher. The philosopher is to translate the best available scientific theory into that whichQuine called ‘canonical notation’, namely, ‘the language of modern logic as developed by Frege, Peirce,Russell and others’ (Orenstein 2002: 16). Moreover, the philosopher is to make the translation in such a way as to minimize the theory’s ontological commitments. Only after such a translation, which Quine calls‘explication’ can one say, at a philosophical level: ‘that is What There Is’. (However, Quine cannot fully capitalize those letters, as it were. For he thinks that there is a pragmatic element to ontology. See section3.a below.) This role for philosophy is a reduced one. For one thing, it deprives philosophy of somethingtraditionally considered one of its greatest aspirations: necessary truth. On Quine’s conception, no truthcan be absolutely necessary. (That holds even for the truths of Quine’s beloved logic, since they, too, fall within the web of belief.) By contrast, even Strawson and the positivists – the latter in the form of ‘analytictruth’ – had countenanced versions of necessary truth.

Saul Kripke - the third important reviver of metaphysics - allows the philosopher a role that is perhapsslightly more distinct than Quine does. Kripke does that precisely by propounding a new notion of

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necessity. (That said, some identify Ruth Barcan Marcus as the discoverer of the necessity at issue.) According to Kripke (1980), a truth T about X is necessary just when T holds in all possible worlds thatcontain X. To explain: science shows us that, for example, water is composed of H 20; the philosophical question is whether that truth holds of all possible worlds (all possible worlds in which water exists) and isthereby necessary. Any such science-derived necessities are aposteriori just because, and in the sense that,they are (partially) derived from science.

Aposteriori necessity is a controversial idea. Kripke realizes this. But he asks why it is controversial. Thenotions of the apriori and aposteriori are epistemological (they are about whether or not one needs toinvestigate the world in order to know something), whereas – Kripke points out – his notion of necessity isontological (that is, about whether things could be otherwise). As to how one determines whether a truthobtains in all possible worlds, Kripke’s main appeal is to the intuitions of philosophers. The next subsectionsomewhat scrutinizes that appeal, together with some of the other ideas of this subsection.

e. Naturalism including Experimentalism and Its Challenge to Intuitions

Kripke and especially Quine helped to create, particularly in the United States, a new orthodoxy within Analytic philosophy. That orthodoxy is naturalism or - the term used by its detractors - scientism . Butnaturalism (/scientism) is no one thing (Glock 2003a: 46; compare Papineau 2009). Ontological naturalism holds that the entities treated by natural science exhaust reality. Meta philosophical naturalism– which is the focus in what follows – asserts a strong continuity between philosophy and science. A common construal of that continuity runs thus. Philosophical problems are in one way or another ‘tractablethrough the methods of the empirical sciences’ ( Naturalism , Introduction). Now, within metaphilosophicalnaturalism, one can distinguish empirical philosophers from experimental philosophers (Prinz 2008).Empirical philosophers enlist science to answer, or to help answer, philosophical problems. Experimentalphilosophers (or ‘experimentalists’) themselves do science, or do so in collaboration with scientists. Let usstart with empirical philosophy.

Quine is an empirical philosopher in his approach to metaphysics and even more so in his approach toepistemology. Quine presents and urges his epistemology thus: ‘The stimulation of his sensory receptors isall the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just

see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology?’ (Quine 1977: 75). Such naturalisticepistemology – in Quine’s own formulation, ‘naturalized epistemology’ – has been extended to moralepistemology. ‘A naturalized moral epistemology is simply a naturalized epistemology that concerns itself with moral knowledge’ (Campbell and Hunter 2000: 1). There is such a thing, too, as naturalized aesthetics:the attempt to use science to solve aesthetical problems (McMahon 2007). Other forms of empiricalphilosophy include neurophilosophy, which applies methods from neuroscience, and sometimes computerscience, to questions in the philosophy of mind.

Naturalized epistemology has been criticized for being insufficiently normative. How can descriptions of epistemic mechanisms determine license for belief? The difficulty seems especially pressing in the case of moral epistemology. Wittgenstein’s complaint against naturalistic aesthetics – a view he called ‘exceedingly

stupid’ – may intend a similar point. ‘The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by anaesthetic impression is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as tohow people react’ (all Wittgenstein 1966: 17, 21). A wider disquiet about metaphilosophical naturalism isthis: it presupposes a controversial view explicitly endorsed by Quine, namely that science alone providestrue or good knowledge (Glock 2003a: 28, 46). For that reason and for others, some philosophers,including Wittgenstein, are suspicious even of scientifically-informed philosophy of mind.

Now the experimentalists – the philosophers who actually do science – tend to use science not to proposenew philosophical ideas or theories but rather to investigate existing philosophical claims. Thephilosophical claims at issue are based upon intuitions , intuitions being something like ‘seemings’ orspontaneous judgments. Sometimes philosophers have employed intuitions in support of empirical claims.

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For example, some ethicists have asserted, from their philosophical armchairs, that character is the mostsignificant determinant of action. Another example: some philosophers have speculated that most peopleare ‘incompatibilists’ about determinism. (The claim in this second example is, though empirical,construable as a certain type of second-order intuition, namely, as a claim that is empirical, yet made fromthe armchair, about the intuitions that other people have.) Experimentalists have put such hunches to thetest, often concluding that they are mistaken (see Levin 2009 and Levy 2009). At other times, though, thetype of intuitively-based claim that experimentalists investigate is non-empirical or at least not evidentlyempirical. Here one finds, for instance, intuitions about what counts as knowledge, about whether some

feature of something is necessary to it (recall Kripke, above), about what the best resolution of a moraldilemma is, and about whether or not we have free will. Now, experimentalists have not quite tested claimsof this second sort. But they have used empirical methods in interrogating the ways in which philosophers,in considering such claims, have employed intuitions. Analytic philosophers have been wont to use theirintuitions about such non-empirical matters to establish burdens of proof, to support premises, and toserve as data against which to test philosophical theories. But experimentalists have claimed to find that, atleast in the case of non-philosophers, intuitions about such matters vary considerably . (See for instance Weinberg, Nichols and Stitch 2001.) So, why privilege the intuitions of some particular philosopher?

Armchair philosophers have offered various responses. One is that philosophers’ intuitions diverge from‘folk’ intuitions only in this way: the former are more considered versions of the latter (Levin 2009). Butmight not such considered intuitions vary among themselves? Moreover: why at all trust even consideredintuitions? Why not think – with Quine (and William James, Richard Rorty, Nietzsche, and others) thatintuitions are sedimentations of culturally or biologically inherited views? A traditional response to that lastquestion (an ‘ordinary language response’ and equally, perhaps, ‘an ideal language’ response) runs asfollows. Intuitions do not convey views of the world. Rather they convey an implicit knowledge of conceptsor of language. A variation upon that reply gives it a more naturalistic gloss. The idea here is that(considered) intuitions, though indeed ‘synthetic’ and, as such, defeasible, represent good prima facieevidence for the philosophical views at issue, at least if those views are about the nature of concepts (see forinstance Graham and Horgan 1994).

3. Pragmatism, Neopragmatism, and Post-Analytic

Philosophy a. Pragmatism

The original or classical pragmatists are the North Americans C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952) and, perhaps, G. H. Mead . The metaphilosophy of pragmatism unfolds fromthat which became known as ‘the pragmatic maxim’.

Peirce invented the pragmatic maxim as a tool for clarifying ideas. His best known formulation of themaxim runs thus: ‘Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive theobject of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of theobject’ (Peirce 1931-58, volume 5: section 402). Sometimes the maxim reveals an idea to have no meaning.Such was the result, Peirce thought, of applying the maxim to transubstantiation, and, indeed, to many metaphysical ideas. Dewey deployed the maxim similarly. He saw it ‘as a method for inoculating ourselvesagainst certain blind alleys in philosophy’ (Talisse and Aikin 2008: 17). James construed the maximdifferently. Whereas Peirce seemed to hold that the ‘effects’ at issue were, solely, effects upon sensoryexperience , James extended those effects into the psychological effects of believing in the idea(s) inquestion. Moreover, whereas Peirce construed the maxim as a conception of meaning, James turned it intoa conception of truth. ‘“The true”’ is that which, ‘in almost any fashion’, but ‘in the long run and on the whole’, is ‘expedient in the way of our thinking ’ (James 1995: 86). As a consequence of these moves, Jamesthought that many philosophical disputes were resolvable , and were only resolvable, through the pragmaticmaxim.

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None of the pragmatists opposed metaphysics as such or as a whole. That may be because each of themheld that philosophy is not fundamentally different to other inquiries. Each of Peirce, James and Dewey elaborates the notion of inquiry, and the relative distinctiveness of philosophy, in his own way. But there iscommon ground on two views. (1) Inquiry is a matter of coping . Dewey, and to an extent James,understand inquiry as an organism trying to cope with its environment. Indeed Dewey was considerably influenced by Darwin. (2) Experimental science is the exemplar of inquiry . One finds this second idea inDewey but also and especially in Peirce. The idea is that experimental science is the best method or modelof inquiry, be the inquiry practical or theoretical, descriptive or normative, philosophical or non-

philosophical. ‘Pragmatism as attitude represents what Mr. Peirce has happily termed the “laboratory habitof mind” extended into every area where inquiry may fruitfully be carried on’ (Dewey 1998, volume 2: 378).Each of these views (that is, both 1 and 2) may be called naturalistic (the second being a version of metaphilosophical naturalism; q.v. section 2.e).

According to pragmatism (though Peirce is perhaps an exception) pragmatism was a humanism . Itspurpose was to serve humanity. Here is James (1995: 2): ‘no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives’, the ‘it’ here being pragmatist philosophy and alsophilosophy in general. James held further that pragmatism, this time in contrast with some otherphilosophies, allows the universe to appear as ‘a place in which human thoughts, choices, and aspirationscount for something’ (Gallie 1952: 24). As to Dewey, he held the following. ‘Ideals and values must beevaluated with respect to their social consequences, either as inhibitors or as valuable instruments forsocial progress’; and ‘philosophy, because of the breadth of its concern and its critical approach, can play acrucial role in this evaluation’ (Dewey, section 4). Indeed, according to Dewey, philosophy is to be ‘a socialhope reduced to a working programme of action, a prophecy of the future, but one disciplined by seriousthought and knowledge’ (Dewey 1998, vol. 1: 72). Dewey himself pursued such a programme, and not only in his writing – in which he championed a pervasive form of democracy – but also (and to help enable suchdemocracy) as an educationalist.

Humanism notwithstanding, pragmatism was not hostile to religion. Dewey could endorse religion as ameans of articulating our highest values. James tended to hold that the truth of religious ideas was to bedetermined, at the broadest level, in the same way as the truth of anything else. Peirce, for his part, was amore traditional philosophical theist. The conceptions of religion advocated by James and Dewey have been criticized for being very much re conceptions (Talisse and Aikin 2008: 90–94). A broader objection topragmatist humanism is that its making of man the measure of all things is false and even pernicious. Onefinds versions of that objection in Heidegger and Critical Theory. One could level the charge, too, from theperspective of environmental ethics . Rather differently, and even more broadly, one might think that ‘moraland political ambitions’ have no place ‘within philosophy proper’ (Glock 2003a: 22 glossing Quine).Objections of a more specific kind have targeted the pragmatic maxim. Critics have faulted Peirce’s versionof the pragmatic maxim for being too narrow or too indeterminate; and Russell and others have criticizedJames' version as a misanalysis of what we mean by ‘true’.

Pragmatism was superseded (most notably in the United States) or occluded (in those places where it took little hold in the first place) by logical positivism. But the metaphilosophy of logical positivism hasimportant similarities to pragmatism’s. Positivism’s verifiability principle is very similar to Peirce’s maxim.The positivists held that science is the exemplar of inquiry. And the positivists, like pragmatism, aimed atthe betterment of society. Note also that positivism itself dissolved partly because its original tenetsunderwent a ‘“pragmaticization”’ (Rorty 1991b: xviii). That pragmaticization was the work especially of Quine and Davidson , who are ‘logical pragmatists’ in that they use logical techniques to develop some of themain ideas of pragmatists (Glock 2003a: 22–3; see also Rynin 1956). The ideas at issue includeepistemological holism and the underdetermination of various type of theory by evidence. The latter is theaforementioned (section 2.d.iii) pragmatic element within Quine’s approach to ontology (on which seefurther Quine’s Philosophy of Science , section 3).

b. Neopragmatism: Rorty

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The label ‘neopragmatism’ has been applied to Robert Brandom, Susan Haack, Nicholas Rescher, RichardRorty, and other thinkers who, like them, identify themselves with some part(s) of classical pragmatism.(Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, John McDowell, and Hilary Putnam are borderline cases; each takesmuch from pragmatism but is wary about ‘pragmatist’ as a self-description.) This section concentrates uponthe best known, most controversial, and possibly the most metaphilosophical, of the neopragmatists: Rorty.

Much of Rorty’s metaphilosophy issues from his antirepresentationalism. Antirepresentationalism is, in thefirst instance, this view: no representation (linguistic or mental conception) corresponds to reality in a way that exceeds our commonsensical and scientific notions of what it is to get the world right. Rorty’sarguments against the sort of privileged representations that are at issue here terminate or summarize asfollows. ‘[N]othing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept [...] [T]here is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence’ (Rorty 1980:178). Rorty infers that ‘the notion of “representation,” or that of “fact of the matter,”’ has no ‘useful role inphilosophy’ (Rorty 1991b: 2). We are to conceive ourselves, or our conceptions, not as answerable to the world, but only to our fellows (see McDowell 2000: 110).

Rorty thinks that antirepresentationalism entails the rejection of a metaphilosophy which goes back to theGreeks, found a classic expression in Kant, and which is pursued in Analytic philosophy. Thatmetaphilosophy, which Rorty calls ‘epistemological’, presents philosophy as ‘a tribunal of pure reason,upholding or denying the claims of the rest of culture’ (Rorty 1980: 4). More fully: philosophy judgesdiscourses, be they religious, scientific, moral, political, aesthetical or metaphysical, by seeing which of them, and to what degree, disclose reality as it really is. (Clearly, though, more needs to be said if thisconception is to accommodate Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’. See Kant: Metaphysics, section 4.)

Rorty wants the philosopher to be, not a ‘cultural overseer’ adjudicating types of truth claims, but an‘informed dilettante’ and a ‘Socratic intermediary’ (Rorty 1980: 317). That is, the philosopher is to elicit‘agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement’ (Rorty 1980: 318) between or within varioustypes or areas of discourse. Philosophy so conceived Rorty calls ‘hermeneutics’. The Rortian philosopherdoes not seek some schema allowing two or more discourses to be translated perfectly one to the other (anidea Rorty associates with representationalism). Instead she inhabits hermeneutic circle. ‘[W]e play back and forth between guesses about how to characterize particular statements or other events, and guesses

about the point of the whole situation, until gradually we feel at ease with what was hitherto strange’ (1980:319). Rorty connects this procedure to the ‘edification’ that consists in ‘finding new, better, moreinteresting, more fruitful ways of speaking’ (p. 360) and, thereby, to a goal he calls ‘existentialist’: the goalof finding new types of self-conception and, in that manner, finding new ways to be.

Rorty’s elaboration of all this introduces further notable meta philosophical views. First: ‘Blake is as muchof a philosopher Fichte and Henry Adams more of a philosopher than Frege’ (Rorty 1991a: xv). For Sellars was right, Rorty believes, to define philosophy as ‘an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possiblesense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term’ (Sellars 1963: 1; comparesection 6, Sellars’ Philosophy of Mind ; presumably, though, Rorty holds that one has good philosophy whensuch attempts prove ‘edifying’). Second: what counts as a philosophical problem is contingent, and not just

in that people only discover certain philosophical problems at certain times. Third: philosophical argument,at least when it aspires to be conclusive, requires shared assumptions; where there are no or few sharedassumptions, such argument is impossible.

The last of the foregoing ideas is important for what one might call Rorty’s practical metaphilosophy. Rorty maintains that one can argue about morals and/or politics only with someone with whom one shares someassumptions. The neutral ground that philosophy has sought for debates with staunch egoists andunbending totalitarians is a fantasy. All the philosopher can do, besides point that out, is to create aconception that articulates, but does not strictly support, his or her moral or political vision. Thephilosopher ought to be ‘putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit’ (Rorty 1991b: 178) – andsimilarly for morality. Rorty thinks that no less a political philosopher than John Rawls has already come

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close to this stance (Rorty 1991b: 191). Nor does Rorty bemoan any of this. The ‘cultural politics’ whichsuggests ‘changes in the vocabularies deployed in moral and political deliberation’ (Rorty 2007: ix) is moreuseful than the attempt to find philosophical foundations for some such vocabulary. The term ‘culturalpolitics’ could mislead, though. Rorty does not advocate an exclusive concentration on cultural as againstsocial or economic issues. He deplores the sort of philosophy or cultural or literary theory that makes it‘almost impossible to clamber back down [...] to a level [...] on which one might discuss the merits of a law,a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy’ (Rorty 2007: 93).

Rorty’s metaphilosophy, and the philosophical views with which it is intertwined, have been attacked asirrationalist, self-refuting, relativist, unduly ethnocentric, complacent, anti-progressive, and even asinsincere. Even Rorty’s self-identification with the pragmatist tradition has been challenged (despite theexistence of at least some clear continuities). So have his readings, or appropriations, of his philosophicalheroes, who include not only James and Dewey but also Wittgenstein, Heidegger and, to a lesser extent,Davidson and Derrida. For a sample of all these criticisms, see Brandom 2000 (which includes replies by Rorty) and Talisse and Aikin 2008: 140–148.

c. Post-Analytic Philosophy

‘Post-Analytic philosophy’ is a vaguely-defined term for something that is a current rather than a group orschool. The term (in use as early as Rajchman and West 1985) denotes the work of philosophers who owemuch to Analytic philosophy but who think that they have made some significant departure from it. Oftenthe departures in question are motivated by pragmatist allegiance or influence. (Hence the placing of thissection.) The following are all considerably pragmatist and are all counted as post-Analytic philosophers:Richard Rorty; Hilary Putnam; Robert Brandom; John McDowell. Still, those same figures exhibit, also, aturn to Hegel (a turn rendered slightly less remarkable by Hegel’s influence upon Peirce and especially upon Dewey). Some Wittgensteinians count as post-Analytic too, as might the later Wittgenstein himself.Stanley Cavell stands out here, though in one way or another Wittgenstein strongly influenced most of philosophers mentioned in this paragraph. Another common characteristic of those deemed post-Analyticis interest in a range of ‘Continental’ thinkers. Rorty looms large here. But there is also the aforementionedinterest in Hegel, and, for instance, the fact that one finds McDowell citing Gadamer.

Post-Analytic philosophy is associated with various more or less meta philosophical views. One is therejection or severe revision of any notion of philosophical analysis. Witness Rorty, Brandom’s self-styled‘analytic pragmatism’, and perhaps, metaphilosophical naturalism (q.v. section 2.e). (Still: only rarely – asin Graham and Horgan 1994, who advocate what they call ‘Post-Analytic Metaphilosophy’ – do naturalistscall themselves ‘post-Analytic’.) Some post-Analytic philosophers go further, in that they tend, often underthe influence of Wittgenstein, to attempt less to solve and more to dissolve or even discard philosophicalproblems. Each of Putnam, McDowell and Rorty has his own version of this approach, and each singles outfor dissolution the problem of how mind or language relates to the world. A third characteristic feature of post-Analytic philosophy is the rejection of a certain kind of narrow professionalism. That sort of professionalism is preoccupied with specialized problems and tends to be indifferent to broader social andcultural questions. One finds a break from such narrow professionalism in Cavell, in Rorty, in Bernard Williams, and to an extent in Putnam (although also in such "public" Analytic philosophers as A. C.Grayling).

Moreover, innovative or heterodox style is something of a criterion of post-Analytic philosophy. One thinkshere especially of Cavell. But one might mention McDowell too. Now, one critic of McDowell faults him forputting ‘barriers of jargon, convolution, and metaphor before the reader hardly less formidable than thosecharacteristically erected by his German luminaries’ (Wright 2002: 157). The criticism betokens the way inpost-Analytic philosophers are often regarded, namely as apostates. Post-Analytic philosophers tend todefend themselves by arguing either that Analytic philosophy needs to reconnect itself with the rest of culture, and/or that Analytic philosophy has itself shown the untenability of some of its most centralassumptions and even perhaps ‘come to the end of its own project—the dead end’ (Putnam 1985: 28).


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4. Continental Metaphilosophy

a. Phenomenology and Related Currents

i. Husserl’s Phenomenology

Phenomenology , as pursued by Edmund Husserl describes phenomena. Phenomena are things in the mannerin which they appear. That definition becomes more appreciable through the technique through which

Husserl means to gain access to phenomena. Husserl calls that technique the epoche (a term that owes to Ancient Greek skepticism). He designates the perspective that it achieves – the perspective that presentsone with ‘phenomena’ – ‘the phenomenological reduction ’. The epoche consists in suspending ‘the naturalattitude’ (another term of Husserl’s coinage). The natural attitude comprises assumptions about the causes,the composition, and indeed the very existence of that which one experiences. The epoche , Husserl says,temporarily ‘brackets’ these assumptions, or puts them ‘out of play’ – allowing one to describe the worldsolely in the manner in which it appears. That description is phenomenology.

Phenomenology means to have epistemological and ontological import. Husserl presents theepistemological import – to begin with that – in a provocative way: ‘If “positivism” is tantamount to anabsolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the “positive,” that is to say, on what can be seizedupon originaliter , then we are the genuine positivists’ (Husserl 1931: 20). The idea that Husserl shares with the positivists is that experience is the sole source of knowledge. Hence Husserl’s ‘principle of allprinciples’: ‘whatever presents itself in “intuition” in primordial form [...] is simply to be accepted as it givesitself out to be, but obviously only within the limits in which it thus presents itself’ (Husserl 1931: section24). However, and like various other philosophers (including William James and the German Idealists ),Husserl thinks that experience extends beyond what empiricism makes of it. For one thing – and thisreveals phenomenology’s intended ontological import – experience can be of essences . A technique of ‘imaginative variation’ similar to Descartes' procedure with the wax (see Descartes , section 4) allows one todistinguish that which is essential to a phenomenon and, thereby, to make discoveries about the nature of such phenomena as numbers and material things. Now, one might think that this attempt to deriveessences from phenomena (from things in the manner in which they appear) must be idealist . Indeed – and

despite the fact that he used the phrase ‘to the things themselves!’ as his slogan – Husserl did avow a‘transcendental idealism’, whereby ‘transcendental subjectivity [...] constitutes sense and being’ (Husserl1999: section 41). However, the exact content of that idealism – i.e. the exact meaning of the phrase justquoted – is a matter of some interpretative difficulty. It is evident enough, though, that Husserl's idealisminvolves (at least) the following ideas. Experience necessarily involves various ‘subjective achievements’.Those achievements comprise various operations that Husserl calls ‘syntheses’ and which one might(although here one encounters difficulties) call 'mental'. Moreover, the achievements are attributable to asubjectivity that deserves the name 'transcendental' in that (1) the achievements are necessary conditionsfor our experience, (2) the subjectivity at issue is transcendent in this sense: it exists outside the natural world (and, hence, cannot entirely be identified with what we normally construe as the mind). (On thenotion of the transcendental, see further Kant’s transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments .)

Husserl argued that the denial of transcendental subjectivity ‘decapitates philosophy’ (Husserl 1970: 9). Hecalls such philosophy ‘objectivism’ and asserts that it confines itself to the ‘universe of mere facts’ and alliesitself with the sciences. (Thus Husserl employs ‘positivism’ and ‘naturalism’ as terms with similar import to‘objectivism’.) But objectivism cannot even understand science itself, according to Husserl; for science, hemaintains, presupposes the achievements of transcendental subjectivity. Further, objectivism can makelittle sense of the human mind, of humanity’s place within nature, and of values. These latter failingscontribute to a perceived meaninglessness to life and a ‘fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity’ (Husserl 1970: 9). Consequently, and because serious investigation of science, mind, our place innature, and of values belongs to Europe’s very raison d’être , objectivism helps to cause nothing less than a‘crisis of European humanity’ (Husserl 1970: 299). There is even some suggestion (in the same text) that

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objectivism prevents us from experiencing people as people: as more than mere things.

The foregoing shows that phenomenology has a normative aspect. Husserl did make a start upon asystematic moral philosophy. But phenomenology is intrinsically ethical (D. Smith 2003: 4–6), in that thephenomenologist eschews prejudice and seeks to divine matters for him- or herself.

ii. Existential Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism

Husserl hoped to found a unified and collaborative movement. His hope was partially fulfilled. Heidegger,Sartre and Merleau-Ponty count as heirs to Husserl because (or mainly because) they believed in thephilosophical primacy of description of experience. Moreover, many of the themes of post-Husserlianphenomenology are present already, one way or other, in Husserl. But there are considerable, and indeedmetaphilosophical, differences between Husserl and his successors. The metaphilosophical differences can be unfolded from this: Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty adhere to an ‘existential’ phenomenology.‘Existential phenomenology’ has two senses. Each construal matters metaphilosophically.

In one sense, ‘existential phenomenology’ denotes phenomenology that departs from Husserl’s self-proclaimed ‘pure’ or ‘transcendental’ phenomenology. At issue here is this view of Husserl’s: it is logically possible that a consciousness could survive the annihilation of everything else (Husserl 1999: section 13).Existential phenomenologists deny the view. For they accept a kind of externalism whereby experience, orthe self, is what it is – and not just causally – by dint of the world that is experienced. (On externalism, seePhilosophy of Language , section 4a and Mental Causation , section 3.b.ii.) Various slogans and terms within the work existential phenomenologists express these views. Heidegger’s Being and Time presents the humanmode of being as ‘being-in-the-world’ and speaks not of ‘the subject’ or ‘consciousness’ but of ‘Da-sein’(‘existence’ or, more literally, ‘being-there’). Merleau-Ponty asserts that we are ‘through and throughcompounded of relationships with the world’, ‘destined to the world’ (2002: xi–xv). In Being and Nothingness , Sartre ‘parenthesiz[es] the word “of” when referring, say, to “consciousness (of) a table” [inorder] to reject the “reificatory” idea of consciousness as some thing or container distinct from the world inthe midst of which we are conscious’ (Cooper 1999: 201).

Existential phenomenology, so construed, has metaphilosophical import because it affects philosophical

(phenomenological) method. Being and Nothingness holds that the inseparability of consciousness fromthe objects of consciousness ruins Husserl’s method of epoche (Sartre 1989: part one, chapter one; Cerbone2006: 1989). Merleau-Ponty may not go as far. His Phenomenology of Perception has it that, because weare ‘destined to the world’, ‘The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a completereduction’ (2002: xv). But the interpretation of this remark is debated (see J Smith 2005). At any rate –though this is one of the things that an interpreter of his stance on the reduction has to reckon with –Merleau-Ponty found a greater philosophical use for the empirical sciences than did Husserl. Heidegger was more inclined to keep the sciences in their place. But he too – partly because of his existential(externalist) conception of phenomenology – differed from Husserl on the epoche . Again, however,Heidegger’s precise position is hard to discern. (Caputo 1977 describes the interpretative problem and triesto solve it.) Still, Heidegger’s principal innovation in philoso

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Contemporary Metaphilosophy. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy