The Metaphilosophy Blog

Some years ago Britan Leiter put up a poll on his blog asking: Which person do you most wish the media would stop referring to as a “philosopher”? The three choices were Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida and Leo Strauss. I have very little familiarity with Strauss’s work, but as for Rand and Derrida, I think […]

“This much should be uncontroversial: the method of cases plays an important role in contemporary philosophy” write David Colaço, Markus Kneer, Joshua Alexander and Édouard Machery. There are numerous articles and even entire books about the method of cases, many of them denouncing it as unreliable. What is remarkable about them is that they rarely […]

Let’s have a look at another metaphilosophical remark of Russell’s, this time from The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: I am trying as far as possible again this time, as I did last time, to start with perfectly plain truisms. My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that […]

I’ve decided to create posts with links to recent metaphilosophy-related, non-peer-reviewed stuff I come across. Whenever I collect 7-8 items, there’ll be a new one. Enjoy. M. Arvan: Has philosophy made progress? C. Montiveros: How Philosophy Will Influence Technological Development. The best books on Philosophical Wonder, recommended by Eric Schwitzgebel. Interview by Nigel Warburton. The […]

Recently on The Philosophers’ Cocoon there’s been an interesting discussion on the “no progress” accusation I mentioned in the previous post. It goes something like this: Take any major philosophical question you like. You’ll soon find out there are multiple theories, technical concepts and hair-splitting distinctions, dozens of arguments, replies to the arguments, replies to […]

In The Problems of Philosophy Bertrand Russell writes: Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The knowledge it aims at is the kind of knowledge which gives unity and system to the body of the sciences, and the kind which results from a critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and […]

What I wrote about in the previous post is actually only a side issue in Tobia’s paper. His main point is that intuitions are used as evidence for and against philosophical theories, if “intuitions” are understood as “special kinds of philosophical assumptions, ones to which we are invited to assent that are suitable for argument […]

According to the mainstream metaphilosophical view, intuitions – some sort of spontaneous, non-inferential judgments that just seem true – are used as evidence in philosophy. Philosophers are supposed to come up with thought experiments that “elicit” or “trigger” intuitions, and then rely on those intuitions when they argue for and against philosophical theories. For example, […]