I think a serious problem in philosophical discourse is that individuals feel like their intelligence is being attacked when their belief is being attacked. In my experience Analytical Philosophers are exceedingly intelligent, most especially in terms of comprehension. I would think all of the people I have had extended discourse with on this Forum are smarter than me, but that doesn't mean their program is one of relevance or that their beliefs are accurate. We all have to continually challenge our beliefs in this sense. I think there's a good rule here, where there is pain and psychological defensiveness, that's usually the direction we need to go. — JerseyFlight

Where does imagination and creativity fit in with analytical philosophy? I find it so boring to read that I really do not know it , other from a popular pow. Will an Ayer, a wittgenstein or a Quine say stop dreaming? Or is it like a gauge to measure the correctness of what pops up?

An asshole, though. — Ansiktsburk

Then I suspect he will be slapped on the wrist by some here if he ever posts from hell.

Then I suspect he will be slapped on the wrist by some here if he ever posts from hell. — Olivier5

Maybe he is, its only nicks here. But I wouldn’t try, I dont like to be wristslapped, the probable outcome .

Maybe he is — Ansiktsburk

Indeed!

indeed — “oliver5

Wonder who. Probably more than 1k posts and short ones,

Yeah. Bits and pieces of ideas, among which a good one bubbles up once in a long while... Even the most dishonest trader has to deliver the real stuff every now and then.

That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.
— Olivier5

I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of sweeping generalization I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of baseless impugning of other people's motives I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board.

I just can't figure out how else to read it. Even if you had filled in exactly what you mean by "actual productive work" instead of leaving us to guess, it would still be all of those things.

Why does this seem okay to you? — Srap Tasmaner

Have to agree here. I may have said the original quote but I didn't say anything about productivity. Analytical philosophers were obviously productive.

That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work. — Olivier5

Okay, let's say it is narrow minded. What if philosophy is travelling through a tunnel?

How do you think the Analytical school is beneficial for philosophy as a whole?

I'd observe that every philosopher, by way of their humanity, has tunnel vision to some extent. All individuals are narrow minded. It is only when they come together that their field of vision increases and blindspots are revealed.

While that is a lovely idea, I think it would take a very rare personality to both do philosophy well and also survive a political race. Most people with aptitude in one arena seem to lack it in the other. — Pfhorrest

I agree to some extent, what I disagree with however is characterizing philosophy and politics as just two arenas, one is happening in a centre with multiple arenas, one is a warzone where many weapons are used. I can function in both formats, so long as I've practiced hard with my weapon in one of the arenas. The harder I practice and the more weapons I learn to use, the more effective I can be in the warzone.

Perhaps its most significant function.

I don't know Davidson. I was thinking more of Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle and others.

There's a value in showing the fly the way out of the bottle, and freeing ourselves from the bewitchment of language, to paraphrase Wittgenstein.

So when I complained about you suggesting that a huge chunk of modern philosophy is just a bunch of poseurs, your response was that surely some philosophers are poseurs, Hegel for instance, and painted me as suggesting none are.

When I complain about you claiming Hegel was a poseur, you respond that surely some philosophers are poseurs, and paint me as suggesting none are.

Do you understand that your reasoning here is faulty? That it's the sort of thing most people learn not to do without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom?

@JerseyFlight, does standing up for some basic standards of reason, I'll even say "logic", does that make me an analytic philosopher? If so, that's what I am, but I'm still waiting for you to defend Hegel against this slander.

All individuals are narrow minded. It is only when they come together that their field of vision increases and blindspots are revealed. — MSC

Something a lot like this is actually one of the core cultural values of what we've been calling "analytic philosophy", its cooperative spirit. Sometimes this is described as doing philosophy "piecemeal". Sometimes it's an attempt to model the doing of philosophy on science. In the case of John Austin, he had been responsible for coordinating radar intelligence during World War II and imagined coordinating the analysis of English usage in a similar way, with teams of people working on various different sorts of things people say, because he believed some basic understanding of such things was necessary before you could even start doing philosophy.

Note that I am not claiming "analytic philosophy" invented cooperation or has a monopoly on it. But historically it arose as a reaction against big idealist systems that are typically stamped with a single individual's name and being against such big individual systems was baked into the approach. It is something analytic philosophy has been very self-conscious about for a long time. It is probably one reason philosophers like Peirce and Sellars have been somewhat marginalized, and eventually that sort of neglect was seen as a limitation of the approach. I don't think philosophers today have the distrust of systematic philosophy you can see everywhere in later Wittgenstein, for instance. They even read Heidegger. On the other hand, someone like Rorty, on one reading, takes the idea even further, and claims we need even less theory than we thought, but should instead see philosophy like science not as a particular way of doing things but as the work of a community with the capacity for self-correction. He too calls for greater public engagement and cites Dewey as a model.

But this is what I mean when I say "analytic philosophy is over because it won": insofar as English-speaking philosophers feel ready to start system-building again, insofar as they take seriously calls to greater public engagement (and that applies to all of academia, and especially science -- look at Carl Sagan's pleas for scientists to get out there and explain what they do), they're going to do so without giving up any of the gains made in logic, precision, or sensitivity to the complexities of language and its tendencies to mislead or temptations to be misused. We're keeping all that.

Do you understand that your reasoning here is faulty? — Srap Tasmaner

What's so problematic about it? Mind explaining?

Asserting that your view is "grown-up" is like an exercise in self-justification. — JerseyFlight

So are you critiquing the form of my statement or its substance?

Can you not see that a great deal of your objections amount to form and style? — JerseyFlight

In my dust-up with @Olivier5 they absolutely do not. Sweeping generalizations are a known evil. It doesn't take any advanced philosophy to know that. My dad knew that. Judging others to be poseurs because they say things you disagree with or don't understand is juvenile, and again this is not a matter of advanced philosophy but being a reflective human being.

For example, my oldest son's a musician and he cares a lot about some musicians that are not to everyone's taste, like Tom Waits and Van Morrison. Some people just pass by disagreements over "what's good" -- de gustibus non est disputandum, as the man said. But you'll also find, and quite easily on the internet, a different reaction: the belief that no one really likes Tom Waits, I mean the guy totally sucks, and if you claim to like his music, you're lying, and you must be hipster and a poseur. That's not just juvenile, it's toxic, and it's closed-minded.

In other words, if philosophers don't want to analyze things in terms of the linguistic logical structure, then you should be content with this and simply validate it as an alternative approach. — JerseyFlight

Absolutely! Yes! Yes! Yes! I do what I do, and if you take a different approach, why should I care? The one caveat is what I said at the end of this post above: some of us are loathe to give up the precision we've gained by attention to logic and language. That doesn't mean we think logic and language are the subject matter of philosophy -- good lord, no! But words are our tools, and we believe you need to handle them with care and that attention to detail is no sin. Same for reasoning and inference. It's just care for the tools you do your work with.

@JerseyFlight, I'll bet we could wholeheartedly agree on that.

What's so problematic about it? Mind explaining? — Olivier5

Some philosophers being poseurs (among them Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) does not entail almost all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world in the 20th century being "a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work."

To claim that Hegel was a not poseur is not to claim that no philosopher anywhere at any time was a poseur.

And I stand by my claim that most people figure out this sort of thing without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom. If you like, I could do it up in formal symbolism, or make it look like an Aristotelian syllogism, but I'd need to introduce a quantifier to account for your use of "generally".

To speak candidly, it looks to me now like you're a victim of a certain sort of iconoclastic philosopher. For me, it was Nietzsche, and then later Wittgenstein. I didn't know Popper was one of those.

I had the misfortune of reading Nietzsche when I was young. This is no judgment on the value of his work, but one of the messages a young person just discovering philosophy is going to get is that almost all philosophers before Nietzsche were full of shit. This is also true of Wittgenstein, who gives the impression of being broadly dismissive of most other philosophers -- since he barely mentions them! -- except Frege. (And even when he does mention someone by name it's often for critique -- only it turns out this is a sign of respect; he actually thought well of William James and G. E. Moore.)

This is terribly dangerous for a young person. It's a shortcut you're invited to take -- you don't have to slog through the boring blinkered past but can jump straight to the end of the story where now we finally know what's what. I think I finally started to come out of it when, after probably years of dismissing Husserl because I was steeped in Heidegger and Derrida, I actually read Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and thought it was brilliant.

So it looks to me -- and I am frankly guessing, if I'm wrong I'm wrong, c'est la vie -- like you're a victim of finding too early a certain kind of philosopher who sweeps you up with his denunciations of the bullshit everyone else is up to.

And that's disappointing to me because I've been wanting to read Popper but if he's full of stuff like this it's going to make it hard for me.

all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world — Srap Tasmaner

I have already answered that. They are quite a few academic English-speaking philosophers who don't define themselves as analytical philosophers. Who's making a sweeping generalization now?

I had the misfortune of reading Nietzsche when I was young. [...]

This is terribly dangerous for a young person — Srap Tasmaner

Possibly so... I read Nietzsche as an old person.

I honestly tried to read Hegel, I did, also Wittgenstein. The latter is never even attempting to structure any of his intuitions much. It's bits and pieces. It feels a bit like a flee market. The former was evidently a very smart guy who managed to explain how it's okay to hold two diametrically opposite ideas, as long as you say something like 'Well, both are kinda true at the same time, you know?".

Most importantly, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel told the Germans that helping the poor through social programmes or charity is dishonorable, that "it is only through being a member of the state [Prussian, supposedly] that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life", that the state is God's march on earth, that the state is that "objective spirit that subsumes family and civil society and fulfills them." Etc. Etc.

almost all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world in the 20th century — Srap Tasmaner

all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world
— Srap Tasmaner

I have already that. They are quite a few academic English-speaking philosophers who don't define themselves as analytical philosophers. — Olivier5

Duh.

Who's making a sweeping generalization now? — Olivier5

Even when speaking loosely, and explaining how I'm using the term "analytic philosophy" as I go, a way of using the term I believe to be consonant with casual usage as when people compare "analytic" and "continental", even then I was still more careful than you're being by misquoting me. I mean seriously, leaving "almost" out of the phrase "almost all"? That was an oversight right?

If you didn't understand Hegel or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur. If you didn't understand Wittgenstein or didn't like what he had to say, that doesn't make him a fraud or a charlatan or a poseur.

You want to know what my standards are for discussing philosophy? They're higher than that. In fact, my standards for discussing anything are higher than that.

That was an oversight right? — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed it was. So almost all it is. Are you confident that almost all English-speaking academic philosophers self-identify as analytical?

I know a few American thinkers who make perfect sense most of the time, but they don't waste their time wondering if the king of France is bold, or if there is anything called "meaning" or "the self"... They deal with our rapport to the environment, the mind, ethics, language as a fact of life, culture as a tool of domination, scientific paradigms, etc.

Are you confident that almost all English-speaking academic philosophers self-identify as analytical? — Olivier5

No, I'm confident they don't much care, certainly not for the last thirty or forty years, and I've been perfectly clear and repetitive about how I'm using the phrase, and it has nothing to do with how people self-identify.

(( phone double post ))

And again: insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic philosophy these days takes as a requirement, a rigor that was achieved through the analysis of reasoning and language carried out by our forebears.

Well, I have no reason to doubt your word that almost all English-speaking are academic philosophers, whether they agree or not. I haven't got a clue, statistically speaking, nor do I know of a good criterion to tell AP and non-AP apart... But it's not my understanding. I understand the term to have a more limited extension in time, to be a bit passé now.

In short, you may be talking of a set much broader than the one I'm talking about.

insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic philosophy these days takes as a requirement, a rigor that was achieved through the analysis of reasoning and language carried out by our forebears. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm curious. You have an example of any clarity brought by the analytic tradition? Or, alternatively, of such rigorous modern philosophers?

You could glance at Scott Soames's historical work to get a sense of how broadly the term "analytic philosophy" is usually taken. There's little point in us getting into the weeds about this here.

You have an example of any clarity brought by the analytic tradition? Or, alternatively, of such rigorous modern philosophers? — Olivier5

I think so. You find Searle clear and you must know that Searle's work is based originally on very careful patient work done by J. L. Austin, published after his death as How to Do Things with Words. We probably wouldn't even have the concept of "speech acts" if Austin weren't so fastidious.

Here's a quote from a book intended as a popular treatment of political philosophy by Michael Sandel:

Is it wrong for sellers of goods and services to take advantage of a natural disaster by charging whatever the market will bear? If so, what, if anything, should the law do about it? Should the state prohibit price gouging, even if doing so interferes with the freedom of buyers and sellers to make whatever deals they choose?

I recognize this way of writing. There is an effort, even here in a work written for non-philosophers, to be quite precise in distinguishing the several different questions that may come to mind in talking about price gouging. Sandel intends to be rigorous, precise, careful. He's not talking about language and logic, but justice, and he is doing so in a way that owes much to the sort of care you can see at work in Austin's treatment of speech acts.

Soames appears to define himself as AP, so his enthusiasm may affect his diagnosis. I'm not looking for an hagiography.

I had a look at one of his books:

Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning
Scott Soames

In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning [sic] tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it.

He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind.


Sounds like fascinating stuff, doesn't it? And it comes with a nice attention-grabbing title, too. It should sell well.

Thanks for Austin, didn't know him.

I see ordinary language philosophy as more a refutation of AP and its obsession with logical propositions and perfect T-languages. A return to sanity, in short.

It's a very natural way of thinking, very 'continental' too. Natural languages have much wisdom to teach, if one cares to listen. Ethymology is always a good start to understand the meaning of a word for instance. It can be overdone too of course, like anything.

I only mentored him because he's the de facto "official" historian of the analytic tradition, and a glance at the historical work might give you a sense of the bigness of the tradition's tent. I wasn't commending his work. I haven't read him. And I'm not about to defend every last piece of writing someone calls "analytic philosophy". You again seem to be struggling with how generality and particularity work.