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)
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)