What it would take to convince academia that they've gotten something wrong? Specifically, I'm inclined to believe that academia, the whole of philosophy as far as I can tell at least, has gotten thought and belief wrong. I mean, convention has 'defined' thought and belief in terms of it's having propositional content, which has it's own unbearable burden on my view(either there is no such thing as thought and belief prior to language, or propositions exist prior to language and neither is acceptable). — creativesoul

To be sure, this is mostly an analytic thing. Desires, beliefs, propositional attitudes, they all are analyzed in terms of language, sometimes to the extreme of claiming that minds cannot exist unless there is a language.

However such a view would be incomprehensible to continental thinkers, specifically those in the phenomenological tradition. There is a vast amount of literature that covers how things are given to us through experience that is pre-linguistic. When I grasp a coffee mug, for instance, I don't have the actual belief that the coffee mug "exists" in such-and-such way. Such attitudes are theoretical when in reality I live most of my life in a pre-theoretical attunement to the world.

What you propose to do is something that should have been done a long time ago and it currently happening right now, the "gap bridging" between analytics and continentals. It's not easy, especially when certain analytics insist on being twats and strawmanning the continentals.

Interesting.

I've never looked at my position using such terms...

I seriously recommend reading the literature surrounding phenomenology. At times it honestly has made me despair at just how in the dark analytic philosophy is. Analytic philosophy has its strengths but historicity is not one of them, it insists on re-inventing the wheel for everything. It's like two separate groups all talking about the same thing but ignoring what the other group has to say. Except in this case, and philosophy of mind in general, analytics should really take a break and read some Kant, Husserl and Heidegger.

What it would take to convince academia that they've gotten something wrong? — creativesoul

There's a saying about that. Science progresses one funeral at a time. Someone else made the same point. That no scientist is ever convinced by the newest theory. Rather, the old generation dies off and the new generation, which has grown up with the new theory, comes to accept it.

So basically you have to have a new hot theory and wait for the establishment to die. Physics, math, you name it. You can view a lot of science history through this lens.

What it would take to convince academia that they've gotten something wrong? — creativesoul

How can I convince you that this is entirely the wrong thing to try and do? I won't even try, but instead suggest just a small adjustment that will make things go more easily for you. When the salesman wants to sell you a new car, he doesn't bang on about how crap your old heap of rust is, he extols the virtues and benefits of the new, until you can see that there is no competition.

Exactly so. What Burt Dreben meant when he said, "Great philosophers don't argue."

Yeah. That's good advice. It's tough for me to follow.

:-|

When I enrolled as an undergrad many years ago, I was keen to study philosophy, albeit from a generic '60's truth-seeker' perspective. At the University I attended, at this time, philosophy had been divided into two departments - Traditional and Modern, headed by D M Armstrong, a leading materialist (now there's an oxymoron for you), and General Philosophy, which was basically Marxist/New Left. I was in the no-man's-land in between, surrounded on one side by A J Ayer and the positivists and on the other by incipient post-modernism and Marxist social theory.

I did tell them all what I thought was wrong with them, and to their great credit, they took it on the chin. I was very impressed with the way I was treated, more so as the years passed and I realised what a bumptious know-it-all I must have seemed. (Keith Campbell's lectures on Philosophy of Matter were the standout, along with David Stove on Positivism and Hume).

But in the end I decamped to the Department of Comparative Religion - or Mysticism and Heresy, as I referred to it - there to try and work out where the thread got lost in the History of Ideas. I gave up on philosophy, as such - I decided the kind of philosophy I'm interested in, no longer exists in the Western academic scene. Subsequently I have found much of value - phenomenology was mentioned above. I learned about Kant indirectly but believe his Copernican Revolution in Thought is hardly understood to this day.

The search goes on......

I suggest that you're too generous in your assessment of Western academic philosophers. Isn't the evidence most consistent with the theory that their main goal and purpose is the keep their discussions and debates going perpetually, so that they can all perpetually have something to publish? You know, "Publish or Perish."

Don't waste your time talking to them or writing a paper for them.

Michael Ossipoff