Widespread and lasting consensus has not been philosophy's fate. Indeed, one of philosophy's most striking features is its ability to accommodate “not only different answers to philosophical questions” but also “total disagreement on what questions are philosophical” (Rorty 1995, 58). It is therefore hardly surprising that philosophers' responses to this metaphilosophical predicament have been similarly varied. This article considers two recent diagnoses of philosophical diversity: Kornblith and Rescher (respectively) claim that taking philosophical disagreement seriously does not lead to metaphilosophical scepticism. (...) The article argues that their confidence is misplaced in so far as both wrongly assume that ordinary, first-order philosophical practice and second-order metaphilosophical reflection are separate enterprises. We can say that the universe consists of a substance, and this substance we will call “atoms,” or else we will call it “monads.” Democritus called it atoms. Leibniz called it monads. Fortunately, the two men never met, or there would have been a very dull argument. (Allen 1997, 171) When will philosophers learn to be less pretentious and arrogant in their claims? One would imagine that the philosophic experiences of twenty-five centuries would have taught them the fallacy of self-esteem! (Schilpp 1935, 233). (shrink)

This article argues for four interrelated claims: Metaphilosophy is not one sub-discipline of philosophy, nor is it restricted to questions of methodology. Rather, metaphilosophical inquiry encompasses the general background conditions of philosophical practice. These background conditions are of various sorts, not only those routinely considered “philosophical” but also those considered biographical, historical, and sociological. Accordingly, we should be wary of the customary distinction between what is proper and merely contingent to philosophy. “What is philosophy?” is best understood as a practical (...) question concerning how members of different philosophical sub-communities identify what is pertinent to their respective activities and self-conceptions. Given –, understanding what philosophy is requires us to take more seriously the social-institutional dimension of contemporary philosophical practice. (shrink)

Critical attention to Wilfrid Sellars’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) has focused on the dubious Peircean optimism about scientific convergence that underwrites Sellars’s talk of “the” scientific image. Sellars’s ultimate Peircean ontology has led Willem deVries, for instance, to accuse him of being a naturalistic “monistic visionary.” But this complaint of monism misplays the status of the ideal end of science in Sellars’s thinking. I propose a novel reading of PSIM, foregrounding its opening methodological reflections. On this (...) reading, the central point of the paper is to accuse figures like Wittgenstein and Strawson, whom I call “analytical quietists,” of taking the unity of intellectual endeavor as somehow given. Such unity as is forthcoming is, Sellars tells us, a task. I conclude by noting that a structurally similar accusation of too easily presumed unity emerges at the end of the paper, against a familiar sort of anti-relativistic moral theorizing. Thus, Sellars’s conception of the task of philosophy is, at least potentially, a point of surprising ethico-political significance as well. (shrink)

What is the relevance of the history of philosophy to philosophy as such? This is not the question, what is the reason for studying the history of philosophy? This question is easy to answer. Philosophy is part of our culture, and the history of our culture is worth studying, if anything is. Nor is it the question, should academic institutions teach the history of philosophy as part of a philosophical education? It is widely accepted that students should be taught the (...) history of philosophy, even if philosophy itself is not considered an essentially historical discipline. An education in the history of philosophy is part of a broadly humanistic university education, and something of value for this reason alone, without it being necessary for anyone who actually pursues philosophy creatively and systematically to have to take history into account. (shrink)