Today’s critical state of philosophy is examined by considering two of its aspects: the way in which philosophy presently is ever more typically practised and the new challenges it has to face to keep up with the changed scientific, and more generally cultural and social context. The essay outlines some prospects of progress in the light of those which still now can be considered the proper tasks of philosophical inquiry. Such tasks are singled out through an historical survey of the (...) original characters of philosophy and an appraisal of its theoretical motivations. The importance of the history of philosophy and the necessity of achieving a virtuous relation among the various philosophical disciplines are stressed to contrast the dangers of excess specialisation and professionalism. (shrink)

This Critical Notice is about aboutness in logic and language. In a first part, I discuss the origin of the issue and the philosophical background to Yablo's book Aboutness (PUP 2014), which is itself the subject of the second and main part of my paper.

What is the exact relationship between analytic philosophy and philosophy of science? In this paper, I will address this question from the perspective of research traditions, with the help of recent histor- ical studies on analytic philosophy. The two groups are particularly focused: the Polish philosophers and the logical empiricists in Berlin. Neither of them is unknown to us. However, by taking seriously their connection to the development of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science as research traditions, I believe, the (...) understanding of our own tradition may be improved. (shrink)

I start with some of the early challenges to the widely-employed philosophical method of cases—the very challenges that originally prompted the new movement of experimental philosophy—and with some fundamental questions about the method that are yet to have been given satisfying answers. I then propose that what has allowed both ‘armchair’ and ‘experimental’ participants in the ongoing debates concerning the method to ignore or repress those early challenges—and in particular Robert Cummins’s ‘calibration objection’—and to discount fundamental disagreements about those questions, (...) is in large part ‘the claim of continuity’, which is the claim, or assumption, that there is no philosophically significant difference between whatever it is that we do when we give our answer to the theorist’s question of whether some philosophically interesting word ‘applies’ (positively or negatively) to some theoretically significant case, and our use of that same word in the course of ordinary, non-philosophical discourse. I then summarize the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) argument against the claim of continuity, and explain why answers to the theorist’s questions are vulnerable to the calibration objection in a way that our non-philosophical, everyday employment of the same words is not. This then leads me to question another widespread assumption, which is the assumption that the theorist’s questions—as raised in the theorist’s context—have clear enough sense and correct answers. I end by responding to a series of objections to my argument and to OLP more generally. (shrink)

Whereas epistemology is the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope, metaepistemology takes a step back from particular substantive debates in epistemology in order to inquire into the assumptions and commitments made by those who engage in these debates. This entry will focus on a selection of these assumptions and commitments, including whether there are objective epistemic facts; and how to characterize the subject matter and the methodology of epistemology.