Précis of The Philosophy of Philosophy

Abstract

The book defends two claims about philosophy in apparent tension with each other: that philosophical inquiry is much more like other sorts of inquiry than many philosophers have liked to pretend, and that philosophical inquiry can legitimately be pursued by traditional armchair methods. Of course, the predominance of armchair methods is itself a difference between philosophy and many other sorts of inquiry, although armchair methods are even more predominant in mathematics, and are widespread elsewhere?for instance, in physics, economics and linguistics. But the obvious difference in methodological emphasis has been taken to manifest a deeper, more radical distinctiveness in the nature of philosophy, roughly speaking on the grounds that since one cannot legitimately conduct an ordinary inquiry into some aspect of the world without getting out of one's armchair to look at that aspect, armchair philosophizing is legitimate only if it is not an ordinary inquiry into some aspect of the world. For those unwilling to give up armchair philosophizing, the pressure was to explain what extraordinary sort of inquiry it constituted. The phrase 'linguistic turn' labels a cluster of such attempts. In some versions, philosophical questions are reinterpreted as really being questions about words or concepts, even when they appear not to be. The hope is that if philosophical questions are not really about the world beyond the armchair, we can answer them without leaving the armchair. But such reinterpretation badly misconceives what many contemporary analytic philosophers are doing. For instance, the philosophy of time is about time itself, not just temporal words or concepts. We should be more willing to take philosophers' questions at face value. Other versions of the linguistic or conceptual turn represent philosophical questions as conceptual questions in the sense that they can be answered on the basis of conceptual or analytic truths, available from the armchair. These versions fail too.