Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

A revisionary history of analytic philosophy (interview with Fraser MacBride)

#1
C C Offline
https://316am.site123.me/articles/a-revi...mes-series

INTRO: Fraser MacBride is a philosopher working in the history of analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, logic and metaphysics. Here he discusses the history of analytic philosophy, the usual story that's told about its origins, his revisionary version, Kant rather than Frege as the key figure [...] how he sees the contemporary manifestation of the analytic tradition and philosophers and environmentalism.

EXCERPTS (from interview): Despite all the excellent scholarly work that’s been done in recent years, I still think it’s fair to say that there is an entrenched and influential story about early analytic philosophy, one typically taught to our students: Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein are the major figures, only certain familiar texts by them repay study, and it is the discovery and development of the new logic that is key to understanding the origins of analytic philosophy and its unfolding.

But I argue in my book, On the Genealogy of Universals: The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy (OUP, 2018), that other figures and other texts were important to the historical development of analytic philosophy too and it was far more metaphysics than logic that was the driver of change in the early years.

The upshot is that I find the usual story exaggerated, incomplete, and mistaken in various ways. Generally I think that formal logic isn’t as important to analytic philosophy as we’re taught to think it is. There’s something Whiggish about the Frege-Russell-Wittgenstein narrative as well—that philosophy got better with them and just kept on getting better afterwards.

But we need to remember that the value of our intellectual stock can go down as well as up. There are indeed plenty of respects in which analytic philosophy is more sophisticated than it was a century ago—it’s hard to deny, for example, that Tarski and Montague took our understanding of language to a new level of sophistication by applying logical and mathematical techniques hitherto unavailable. But, I argue in my book, that there are other respects, primarily metaphysical respects, in which the earlier analytic philosophers were wiser than we are.

[...] 'For Kant, I argue, substance and attribute are problematic from an empiricist point of view because we cannot experience the necessary connexions between them either. So Kant problematised substance and attribute as Hume had problematised cause and effect before him.'

[...] 'Metaphysicians are confidently putting forward hypotheses about the nature of reality a priori once more, holding forth from their armchairs about the categories as though none of this had happened, appealing to their intuitions and what they consider to be plausible or plain common sense.'

[...] 'Quine was a naturalist who maintained that philosophy should be constrained by science. Lewis held a different view, harking back to G.E. Moore, that philosophy should be constrained by common sense too.'

[...] 'Lewis’s philosophical liberalism means that philosophers cannot expect to justify their conclusions before their co-workers any more than their poetry.'

[...] 'The lesson I take from history is that philosophy most often makes its greatest strides and most lasting contributions to human knowledge when philosophers are open to influences from beyond their immediate boundaries.' (MORE - details)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Article Cracking the creation of life: Interview with Nick Lane (philosophy of biology) C C 0 54 Apr 4, 2023 09:58 PM
Last Post: C C
  Bayesianism + Philosophy of space and time + Intro to philosophy of race C C 0 75 Aug 7, 2022 03:45 PM
Last Post: C C
  Continental/Analytic divide is alive & well in philosophy: A quantitative analysis C C 0 51 Jun 15, 2022 04:31 AM
Last Post: C C
  The end of analytic philosophy C C 0 110 May 27, 2021 04:21 AM
Last Post: C C
  Religion vs Philosophy in 3 Minutes + Philosophy of Science with Hilary Putnam C C 2 614 Oct 16, 2019 05:26 PM
Last Post: C C
  Bring back science & philosophy as natural philosophy C C 0 492 May 15, 2019 02:21 AM
Last Post: C C
  Indian Materialist Philosophy (interview) C C 0 378 Aug 23, 2018 03:40 PM
Last Post: C C
  The return of Aristotelian views in philosophy & philosophy of science: Goodbye Hume? C C 1 667 Aug 17, 2018 02:01 PM
Last Post: Zinjanthropos
  Teaching philosophy to prisoners + Fragmentation of being (interview) + 15 paradoxes C C 0 371 Apr 8, 2018 05:55 PM
Last Post: C C
  Review: Analytic Philosophy in America C C 0 722 Oct 30, 2014 04:50 AM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)