About

Who am I?

My name is Tomasz Herok, I’m a philosophy PhD student and a tutor at Lancaster University, UK. My research focuses on bizarre and outrageous conclusions in contemporary ethics and how they are reached. I’m originally from Poland, but I also spent parts of my life in the Czech Republic and, recently, Iran. I completed my MA in classics, but my interest in classical antiquity sort of faded away over time.

What is metaphilosophy?

Metaphilosophy is philosophy about philosophy. It deals with the questions of how philosophy is done and what philosophy is. I’m generally more focused on the “how” bit, but here I’m planning to cover both. Some people also use the term “metaphilosophy” to refer to anything to do with the philosophy profession, like department gossip about how to land a job or who has sex with who. This is not going to be discussed here.

Why bother?

One can sometimes hear, from philosophers and non-philosophers alike, things like “philosophy is doomed”, “philosophy is a waste of time”, “there is no progress in philosophy”, “the method of philosophy is fundamentally flawed” etc. On the one hand, I find those claims mostly misguided and self-refuting. On the other, I’m far from thinking contemporary philosophy is doing just fine. This blog is meant to help me, and hopefully others as well, explore this problem in some detail.

If it doesn’t sound like something terribly interesting to you, you might still have reasons to stick around. After all, we all have philosophical beliefs and if you’re in any way interested in examining them, learning something about how they are typically examined can be useful.

Who is it for?

I’ll do my best to keep this blog reasonably jargon-free and digestible to the reader with no philosophy background. That said, some philosophy background may be helpful. I’m planning to write about both basic and more advanced material, summarising others’ arguments as well as sketching some of my own.