The chapter is a general introduction to philosophical methods in the analytic tradition and aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding philosophical methods, an area that lacks systematic treatment in existing literature. It argues that philosophy is a methodical discipline despite its creative and speculative aspects, since philosophical inquiry typically follows standards of argumentation, evidence, and theoretical evaluation. The chapter also makes the first-stab proposal that a method is a structured, ordered procedure deliberately adopted to (...) achieve a specific goal, emphasizing that methods are goal-relative and evaluated in terms of their reliability, efficiency, and adequacy of aims. Further, it distinguishes between individual methods, families of methods, broader methodologies, and methodological issues, and considers the broadly epistemic goals of philosophical methods. The chapter also discusses debates about whether philosophy has distinctive methods (e.g., conceptual analysis or thought experiments), how philosophical methods should be assessed, and how persistent disagreement and limited consensus in philosophy raise concerns about progress and methodological success. It concludes by outlining the volume’s structure, which surveys important methods and methodological approaches in the analytic tradition—including formal methods, argumentation, conceptual analysis, thought experiments, experimental philosophy, and naturalism—offering a guide for newcomers to contemporary debates about philosophical practice. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim to employ intuitions in their philosophical arguments. Others contest that no such intuitions are used frequently or at all in philosophy. This article suggests and defends a conception of intuitions as part of the philosophical method: intuitions are special types of philosophical assumptions to which we are invited to assent, often as premises in argument, that may serve an independent function in philosophical argument and that are not formed through a purely inferential (...) process. A series of philosophical case studies shows that intuitions in these arguments contain the relevant features. The view has implications for philosophical method, offering a compromise between opponents on the divisive debate of the merits of experimental philosophy: experimental philosophy provides an especially useful role in philosophical assumption analysis. (shrink)

This article investigates the role played by the analysis of nonliteral language in Wittgenstein’s later philosophical method. In the first section, I briefly present his motivations for abandoning the Tractarian method and developing a new one, which is centered on the ideas of family resemblances and the overview or synoptic presentation of grammar. In the second section, I offer an account that attempts to unify the apparent variety of what Glock called “roots of […] philosophical confusion” (...) by treating one of the items in his list, “analogies in the surface grammar of logically distinct expressions”, as the most central target of methodological synopsis. I conclude that the figurative use of ordinary-language terms in philosophical discourse generates the majority of our philosophical problems and that its investigation should therefore be seen as one of the defining features of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical method. (shrink)

Is philosophy a unique discipline, or are its methods more like those of other sciences than many philosophers think? Timothy Williamson explains clearly and concisely how contemporary philosophers think and work, and reflects on their powers and limitations.

This paper is the introduction to the Special Issue “Philosophical Methods”. The Special Issue will be published by Synthese.

The problems of referential opacity in psychological contexts require a solution, of which three types are indicated, that contains a profound theory of predication, identity, and individuation. a radical theory, not in the spirit of the current fashions, is outlined. it is called the guise-consubstantiation, conflation, and consociation theory. this theory was first expounded in "thinking and the structure of the world," "philosophia" (1974) and "critica" (1972). the present paper is an introduction to this essay, motivated by two criticisms of (...) romane clark in "not every object of thought has being," "nous" (1978). it is shown that clark's arguments rest on equivocations, one involving the data and the theory, and the other within the theory itself. thus, a discussion of philosophical method turns out to be crucial, and an analysis of expression 'true of' is offered. (shrink)

An Introduction to Philosophical Methods is the first book to survey the various methods that philosophers use to support their views. Rigorous yet accessible, the book introduces and illustrates the methodological considerations that are involved in current philosophical debates. Where there is controversy, the book presents the case for each side, but highlights where the key difficulties with them lie. While eminently student-friendly, the book makes an important contribution to the debate regarding the acceptability of the various (...) class='Hi'>philosophical methods, and so it will also be of interest to more experienced philosophers. (shrink)

I do not believe that it is in general a good thing for philosophers to concern themselves with philosophical method. But in these remarks I discuss an exception, which arises in the interpretation of Wittgenstein. What Wittgenstein does in his Philosophical Investigations cannot be properly understood except in the context of appreciating his explicitly methodological remarks, in which he in effect disclaims any intention to say anything that might be open to dispute. I try to explain how (...) that can be consistent with helpfulness in dealing with philosophical puzzlements. (shrink)

In this article, I propose that illness is philosophically revealing and can be used to explore human experience. I suggest that illness is a limit case of embodied experience. By pushing embodied experience to its limit, illness sheds light on normal experience, revealing its ordinary and thus overlooked structure. Illness produces a distancing effect, which allows us to observe normal human behavior and cognition via their pathological counterpart. I suggest that these characteristics warrant illness a philosophical role that has (...) not been articulated. Illness can be used as a philosophical tool for the study of normally tacit aspects of human existence. I argue that illness itself can be integral to philosophical method, insofar as it facilitates a distancing from everyday practices. This method relies on pathological or limit cases to illuminate normally overlooked aspects of human perception and action. I offer Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the case of Schneider as an example of this method. (shrink)

Genealogy is no longer the name of a singular method. True to its descent in Nietzsche’s writings, it means a plethora of distinct philosophical methods, even if they are all concerned with concepts and their history. In Foucault’s creative incorporation of Nietzsche’s method, genealogy’s distinction from other modes of writing conceptual histories lies in the destruction of the origin as a sacred, singular place of truth, in its meticulous attention to violently embodied practices and in tracing the (...) emergence of ideas and ideals to the contingent victories of conflicts within those practices. Genealogy in this radical sense is still rare as a philosophical method; applying it to the history of philosophy is rarer still. For it poses a difficult challenge: It requires writing a history neither of the mighty dead nor of their eternal philosophical problems, glorious ideas, or magisterial works but of conflict-ridden, embodied philosophical practices. This contribution spells out, and argues for, these two claims to draw a risky conclusion: Writing the history of philosophy as a genealogy of philosophical practices is possible by focusing on the mechanisms of exclusion that shape these practices. For the exclusions of topics and concepts, of groups and individuals, crisscross texts, institutions, and individual habits—they pertain to philosophical practices as a whole. Genealogy as a method for philosophy and its history that takes up Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s challenge must attend to philosophical practices in all their— often overlooked—institutional, bodily, and intellectual details to describe how mechanisms of exclusion have slowly formed what we know today as philosophy. (shrink)

We consider an approach to some philosophical problems that I call the Method of Conceptual Articulation: to recognize that a question may lack any determinate answer, and to re-engineer concepts so that the question acquires a definite answer in such a way as to serve the epistemic motivations behind the question. As a case study we examine “Galileo’s Paradox”, that the perfect square numbers seem to be at once as numerous as the whole numbers, by one-to-one correspondence, and (...) yet less numerous, being a proper subset. I argue that Cantor resolved this paradox by a method at least close to that proposed—not by discovering the true nature of cardinal number, but by articulating several useful and appealing extensions of number to the infinite. Galileo was right to suggest that the concept of relative size did not apply to the infinite, for the concept he possessed did not. Nor was Bolzano simply wrong to reject Hume’s Principle (that one-to-one correspondence implies equal number) in the infinitary case, in favor of Euclid’s Common Notion 5 (that the whole is greater than the part), for the concept of cardinal number (in the sense of “number of elements”) was not clearly defined for infinite collections. Order extension theorems now suggest that a theory of cardinality upholding Euclid’s principle instead of Hume’s is possible. Cantor’s refinements of number are not the only ones possible, and they appear to have been shaped by motivations and fruitfulness, for they evolved in discernible stages correlated with emerging applications and results. Galileo, Bolzano, and Cantor shared interests in the particulate analysis of the continuum and in physical applications. Cantor’s concepts proved fruitful for those pursuits. Finally, Gödel was mistaken to claim that Cantor’s concept of cardinality is forced on us; though Gödel gives an intuitively compelling argument, he ignores the fact that Euclid’s Common Notion is also intuitively compelling, and we are therefore forced to make a choice. The success of Cantor’s concept of cardinality lies not in its truth (for concepts are not true or false), nor its uniqueness (for it is not the only extension of number possible), but in its intuitive appeal, and most of all, its usefulness to the understanding. (shrink)

Observations on philosophical methods, including thought experiments and philosophical intuition.

_An Introduction to Philosophical Methods_ is the first book to survey the various methods that philosophers use to support their views. Rigorous yet accessible, the book introduces and illustrates the methodological considerations that are involved in current philosophical debates. Where there is controversy, the book presents the case for each side, but highlights where the key difficulties with them lie. While eminently student-friendly, the book makes an important contribution to the debate regarding the acceptability of the various (...) class='Hi'>philosophical methods, and so it will also be of interest to more experienced philosophers. (shrink)

This article gives examples of how material from the history of philosophy can provide conceptual resources for specific philosophical methods. The emphasis of the article is on methods of critical thinking. A didactic transformation with a problem-oriented focus and a two-stage process of elementarization is introduced to develop specific philosophical methods that are appropriate for teaching in schools. The aim is that students eventually will be able to use these methods themselves. This didactic transformation is demonstrated by looking (...) at examples of two methods, namely genealogy and immanent critique, and it is finally summed up in a typology of methods and their corresponding problems and solutions. (shrink)

Drawing on scholarship that traces the medieval appropriation of ancient methods of analysis and synthesis, I demonstrate that the intermingling of differing senses of analysis and synthesis, resolution, and composition predates the early moderns. Section 5.1 maps out five distinct ancient senses of resolution and composition and illustrates that several are conflated in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy witnessed a resurgence with the rise of the Jesuit order in the sixteenth century. Section 5.2 examines how earlier methods (...) of analysis and synthesis were taken up and developed by scholastic logicians influential in Descartes’ and Hobbes’ contexts. Sections 5.3 and 5.4 clarify Descartes’ and Hobbes’ claims about philosophical analysis and synthesis in light of this background. I demonstrate that the incoherencies generated by linking their philosophical methods solely to Zabarella’s regressus may be resolved by reinterpreting these claims in their wider context. The question as to whether/how their own and prior philosophical methods of analysis and synthesis shape the methodical procedures that Descartes and Hobbes employ to tackle scientific problems is shelved, but the philosophical texts examined indicate that they need not be directly connected. (shrink)

This chapter employs the inference barrier between the content of talk or thought, and the world beyond such content, for an assessment of common philosophical methods. Content-located evidence (e.g. intuitions) and objects of hypotheses (e.g. anthropogenic kinds) are distinguished from world-located evidence (e.g. empirical observations) and objects of hypotheses (e.g. natural kinds). The crossing of inference barriers, including of the content/world barrier, must be avoided in analytic philosophy, and therefore elements of content (e.g. intuitions) must prudently not be invoked (...) in support of aspects of the world beyond content (e.g. natural kinds). (shrink)

Castañeda offers a linguistically anchored approach to ontology entitled empirical semantico-syntactical structuralism. The entry to phenomenological ontology, or primary ontology, is natural language semantico-syntactical contrasts within given idiolects. The order of ontological inquiry, whose analogy with scientific method is stressed, is the following: 1) Proto-philosophy involves collecting and exegesizing empirical and semantico-syntactical data. 2) Sym-philosophy consists of hypothesizing connections between such data, proposing a theory concerning a given pattern, testing a theory by deduction concerning its ad hoc validity, establishing (...) its fecundity by testing against new data, and replicating the entire process in an attempt to embed the theory in a more comprehensive one. 3) Dia-philosophy involves studying partial isomorphisms and structural constants between theories which constitute the most basic structure of the world and experience. 4) Meta-philosophy, illustrated by the present work, and whose presuppositions address the relation between thinking and symbolism, concerns philosophical method. The fewer such presuppositions the more encompassing and fundamental the ontology. (shrink)

Philosophical methodology is the central focus of pragmatism’s founding documents. The early works of Peirce, James, and Dewey examine methodological questions such as ‘how do we make philosophical ideas clear?’, ‘what is the best method for fixing belief?’ and ‘how do we know whether a philosophical question is answerable?’. Thus, many consider pragmatism inherently methodological – as a metaphilosophy, a view about how philosophy should or must be done (e.g. Talisse 2017). Any summary of pragmatist methods (...) is therefore a summary of pragmatism itself. Given such an impossibly broad remit, this chapter does only three things. First, it provides four broad claims common to pragmatist approaches to philosophical methodology, claims reflecting its underlying theory of inquiry. Second, it briefly examines three core pragmatist methods – for conceptual clarification, for fixing belief, and for settling or dissolving philosophical disputes. Third, it briefly describes differences between the Classical figures regarding each method. This is merely a brief sketch – the reader should consider all entries in this volume relevant to pragmatism qua philosophical method. (shrink)

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods contains twenty-six original and substantive papers examining a wide selection of philosophical methods. Drawing upon an international range of leading contributors, this Handbook will help shape future debates about how philosophy should be done. Topics explored include philosophical disagreement, thought experiments, intuitions, rational reflection, conceptual analysis, explanation, parsimony, and experimental philosophy. Written in a clear and accessible form, and drawing upon the most recent thinking in the field, the papers will be (...) of particular interest to researchers and high-level undergraduates. (shrink)

Blok makes a compelling case for renewed consideration of philosophical method in the pressing context of environmental threats, plunging readers into the depths of Heidegger’s philosophical method...

"This book provides new interpretations of Heidegger's philosophical method in light of 20th-century postmodernism and 21st-century speculative realism. In doing so, it raises important questions about philosophical method in the age of global warming and climate change. Vincent Blok addresses topics that have yet to be extensively discussed in Heidegger scholarship, including Heidegger's method of questioning, the religious character of Heidegger's philosophical method and Heidegger's conceptualization of philosophical method as explorative confrontation. (...) He is also critical of Heidegger's conceptuality and develops a post-Heideggerian concept of philosophical method, which provides a new perspective on the role of willing, poetry and earth-interest in contemporary philosophy. This earth-interest turns out to be particularly important to consider and leads to critical reflections on Heidegger's concept of Earth, the necessity of Earth-interest in contemporary philosophy and a post-Heideggerian concept of the Earth. Heidegger's Concept of Philosophical Method will be of interest primarily to Heidegger scholars and graduate students, but its discussion of philosophical method and environmental philosophy will also appeal to scholars in other disciplines and areas of philosophy"--. (shrink)

Here are crucial data for any theory of the self, self-consciousness or the structure of experience. We discuss the fundamental structure of both indexical reference, especially first-term reference, and quasi-indexical reference, used in attributing first-person reference to others. Chisholm's ingenious account of direct awareness of self is tested against the two sets of data. It satisfies neither. Chisholm's definitions raise serious questions both about philosophical methodology and about the underlying ontology of individuation, identity, and predication. Chisholm's adverbial account of (...) non-physical contents of consciousness is also examined; several questions are raised about the possible success of the linguistic technique of ontological reduction by hyphenation and creation of grammatical devices. (shrink)

Inducing aspect-experiences – the sudden seeing of something anew, as when a face suddenly strikes us as familiar – can be used as a philosophical method. In seeing aspects, I argue, we let ourselves experience what it would be like to conceptualize something in a particular way, apart from any conceptual routine. We can use that experience to examine our ways of conceptualizing things, and re-evaluate the ways we make sense of them. I claim that we are not (...) always passive with regard to these experiences, and explain how we can actively induce them. I distinguish this method from other standard Wittgensteinian philosophical methods. (shrink)

The paper deals with an issue of philosophical methodology, taking into account Wittgenstein’s critical remark that philosophy (metaphysics), in its modus operandi, imitates science. The thesis of the paper is that such approach is wrong because the peculiarity of philosophical thinking cannot be adequately conceptualized in terms of formal logic. This is shown by the analysis of three cases (Plato, Aristotle and Descartes), i. e. three classical metaphysical projects dedicated to the discovery of “the first principles”.

While many of Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophical views are well-known (e.g. her views on practical knowledge or consequentialism), little has been written on her philosophical method, i.e., on her way of doing philosophy. This is unfortunate, for two reasons: First, the failure to understand Anscombe’s method is a major stumbling block for many of her readers. Second, and more importantly, we can still learn a lot from Anscombe’s way of doing philosophy: Her view differs considerably from current (...) alternatives in metaphilosophy. Here we want to begin to fill this lacuna. -/- REPRINT IN: John Haldane (ed.) (2019): The Life and Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe. (St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy.) Imprint Academic: Exeter: 42-61. (shrink)

Many aspects of recent realist work in the philosophy of science have some affi nities with philosophical naturalism. Realists emphasize that the methods of science are theory-dependent, so that the justifi cation for those methods in any particular application will have an a posteriori scientifi c component. Realist treatments of natural kinds treat the defi nitions of those kinds as at least partly a posteriori, and ‘causal’ or ‘naturalistic’ theories of reference for natural kind terms similarly treat at least (...) some aspects of reference as matters for a posteriori empirical investigation. In a number of papers I’ve been developing arguments to the effect that, properly developed, scientifi c realism dictates a thoroughgoing, anti-foundationalist, anti-reductionist naturalistic approach to philosophical matters. What I propose to do here is to pull together the core of those arguments and to indicate what sort of philosophical naturalism is implied. (shrink)

My discussion suggests that one of Richard Peters’ main contributions to the philosophy of education was in expounding and stressing the need for a particular view of the subject, essentially conceptual analysis. The paper proceeds to defend this view and Peters’ specific account of education against the charges that his work relies simply on preferred definitions and that it is unwarrantably prescriptive. The practical value of this kind of philosophy is then further assessed, while in the final section attention is (...) drawn to Peters’ commitment to the idea of education being an integrally moral enterprise. (shrink)

A problem is posed: Is pleasure choiceworthy, or not? The answerer claims that yes, it is. The questioner must refute him by asking questions—by offering him premises to accept or reject. The questioner succeeds if he forces the answerer to accept a proposition contrary to the one he undertook to defend, and fails if the answerer always accepts or rejects premises in a way consistent with that proposition. To a first approximation, dialectic is the distinctive method of Aristotelian philosophy. (...) At the heart of dialectic is the dialectical deduction. This article discusses Aristotle's philosophical method, focusing on dialectical premises, endoxa, and aporiai. It also examines the uses of dialectic in intellectual training, ordinary discussion, and the philosophical sciences, as well as in regard to scientific starting points or first principles. The article concludes by returning to dialectic and philosophy and an important difference between them. (shrink)

The main objective of this paper is to address the problem of the philosophical method, which consists of the lack of consensus among philosophers regarding the proper procedure to carry out this human activity. In this sense, it examines a few methodological proposals put forward by some representatives of contemporary philosophy, emphasizing the impact that the development of modern science has had on such views. In addition, the plausibility of such proposals is assessed.

I argue that we can arrive at a better understanding of the Ethics and why Spinoza wrote it by viewing it through certain ideas expressed in his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. These ideas are: 1) personal remarks, 2) the method and most perfect method, 3) true ideas, 4) false ideas, 5) definitions.

In this paper I tried to give a metaphilosophical characteristic of a philosophical method. I define a philosophical method, indicate its components, describe its relation to the subject matter and aim of investigation, and list difficulties connected with it. I assume that a philosophical method differs from the scientific one. Each philosophical method is based on philosophical theses. This connection between philosophical theses and an assumed philosophical method is (...) shown on the example of the method of the philosophy of God. At the end of my paper I formulated an algorithm which can be used in examining a philosophical method. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s comparison of philosophical methods to therapies has been interpreted in highly different ways. I identify the illness, the patient, the therapist and the ideal of health in Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and answer four closely related questions concerning them that have often been wrongly answered by commentators. The results of this paper are, first, some answers to crucial questions: philosophers are not literally ill, patients of philosophical therapies are not always philosophers, not all philosophers qualify as therapists, (...) the therapies are not necessarily to be thought of as psychological therapies and the ideal of health does not consist in the end of philosophy. Second, the paper shows that the comparison has had a misleading effect, because properties of therapies have been illegitimately projected onto the philosophical methods advanced by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that Dioscorides’s view on medicine is purely pragmatic, focused entirely on the effectiveness of medicines, and derived from trial and error. One reason for this interpretation is that Dioscorides himself wrote little about his theory of medicine. In this article, however, we argue that he would have arranged De Materia Medica in a way that would have been useful only to a skilled practitioner. This argument implies that Dioscorides had a medical theory, as the arrangement of (...) the content could not have followed a trial-and-error approach. It is only in the sense of having a theory that he is able to claim that his text is more “complete” than others. This article provides a historical overview of the text from its genesis to its reception and, ultimately, to its falling out of use. This article concludes with a series of hypotheses on the correspondence between theory and arrangement of the treatise, with the aim of narrowing scholarly conjectures about both. In the final analysis, we argue that an arrangement by family resemblance most closely corresponds to the theory that animates Dioscorides’s text. (shrink)

In this paper I show that one of the most fruitful ways of employing paradoxes has been as a philosophical method that forces us to reconsider basic assumptions. After a brief discussion of recent understandings of the notion of paradoxes, I show that Zeno of Elea was the inventor of paradoxes in this sense, against the background of Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ way of argumentation: in contrast to Heraclitus, Zeno’s paradoxes do not ask us to embrace a paradoxical reality; (...) and in contrast to Parmenides, Zeno shows common assumptions to be internally problematic, not just in light of Eleatic positions. (shrink)

In this essay, we consider the philosophical method of reading and writing, of communication. Normally, we interpret the works of the great philosophers and explain them in papers and presentations. The thinking of Martin Heidegger has given us an indication of an entirely different method of philosophical thinking. In the 1930s, he gave a series of lectures on Nietzsche. In them, he calls his own way of reading and writing a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Nietzsche. We consider (...) the specific character of confrontation, and in what ways it is different from communication. First, we develop an answer to the question of how Heidegger reads Nietzsche. Does he give a charitable or a violent interpretation of Nietzsche and, if neither, how can his confrontation with Nietzsche be characterized? With this, we obtain an indication of the way we have to read Heidegger, indeed, of philosophical reading and writing as such. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to argue, against the formalist or hypothetico-deductivist approach now dominant, that God or substance is for Spinoza a discovery, or indeed a kind of revelation. In both TdlE and Ethics, Spinoza affirms substance as the outcome of a search for salvation. He could not have held that a postulate or presupposition, even if thought necessary, can save man through abstract entailment. Indeed, salvation depends on “the quality of the object to which we cling (...) with love”, the object being “the eternal and infinite thing”. (shrink)

Different human practices require various methods to carry them out successfully. Philosophy, an activity with 2500 years of history, must also have its own method, which demarcates a philosopher from a lay person. This thesis embarks on a project of philosophical method—conceptual tuning. How to do philosophy belongs to the category of metaphilosophy or philosophy of philosophy. Boxers usually do not care about the conceptual question ‘What is boxing?’ and biologists barely ask ‘What is Biology?’. For them, (...) this kind of question is a higher order question which concerns the nature of the thing in itself. It is an external question for most disciplines. But for philosophy, the question concerning the nature of philosophy is an internal question. Self-awareness is a sine qua non of doing philosophy.With such a long history and so many traditions, the method of doing philosophy must be miscellaneous. My thesis attempts to contribute to the discussion of philosophical methodology by proposing a method I shall call conceptual tuning. Conceptual tuning is grounded in the philosophical method of conceptual engineering, advocates of which endeavor to improve our concepts. According to the method of conceptual engineering, philosophical problems stem from defects in our understanding of concepts, and it is the philosopher’s task to fix them. While most conceptual engineering approaches only narrowly focus on the perspective of ‘repairing’ or ‘fixing’, conceptual tuning calls for attention to the ‘expressive’ perspective. In other words, we should put this method in the broad framework of the practice of asking for and giving reasons. In this thesis, I also attempt to explain some previous conceptual methods under the title of conceptual tuning, such as Brandomian method, ordinary language philosophy, and the traditional conceptual analyses. (shrink)

Applying natural science methodologies to the social sciences causes a crisis in science. A crisis of science means the narrowing of researcher subjectivity so the possibility of research heuristics is drastically reduced. Martin Heidegger a philosopher of existentialism tried to solve this problem by developing a method that integrated schools of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This research aims to describe the hermeneutics situation method which embodies the two things above. This research is a type of library research that is (...) descriptive and qualitative. The important value and novelty of this research is that it examines the closeness of philosophy and social science through Martin Heidegger’s way of thinking. A researcher does not live in isolation, he is connected to the context of life in which he lives. The context of life motivates researchers to see the meaning of something. In social research, researchers do not just meet social facts, but meet appropriate events (ereignis). So, social researchers are advised to avoid two things when conducting social research in the context of hermeneutics situation, namely the principle of subject-object division and the value-free principle. The reason is a presumption that a researcher was involved in the surrounding environment which then becomes the object of his research, even before conducting the research. This involvement is what makes the researcher able to understand the object of his research. (shrink)

Lewis is famous as a contemporary philosophical system-builder. The most obvious way his philosophy exhibited a system was in its content: Lewis’s metaphysics, for example, provided answers to many metaphysical puzzles in an integrated way, and there are illuminating connections to be drawn between his general metaphysical views and, for example, his various views about the mind and its place in nature.

This chapter discusses the main features of Ludwig Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, both early and late. It also assesses these features for their merits, partly with a view to current debates. The chapter addresses that his radical position is more than a whimsical manifestation of an anti‐scientific ideology: it is supported by arguments deriving from astute observations about the peculiar character of philosophical problems on the one hand, and logico‐semantic ideas on the other. It also describes three tensions in (...) Wittgenstein's account of conceptual elucidation: treating it as a kind of (psycho‐) therapy or propaganda for a particular point of view vs. regarding it as a type of dialectic argument; insisting on it having a purely critical purpose in dissolving philosophical puzzles vs. allowing for a more positive project of conceptual self‐understanding; and rejecting systematic theories vs. envisaging systematic surveys of our conceptual scheme. (shrink)