Click on the video above if you want to listen to this essay in my German accent or simply scroll below to read it.A few weeks ago, I published an essay on Substack titled The End of Analytic Philosophy. In it, I agreed with Liam Kofi Bright that analytic philosophy has perhaps come close to becoming a degenerating research programme, leaving even many of its practitioners with a pessimistic outlook on its future. But the post was not at all meant to be depressing, for I offered a successor paradigm: naturalistic philosophy. A philosophy strongly continuous with, and often collaborative with, the sciences in order to make progress on our field’s most pressing problems.I was a bit worried about coming out as a ‘non-analytic philosopher’, since most of my peers happily use the label of analytic philosopher for themselves. I was therefore happy to see the overwhelmingly positive reactions that made my essay go somewhat viral on substack and gained me a ton of new subscribers. However, this also brought with it a new bar for my writing, making me go from an experimental week of daily posts to much less frequent posts. Now, I had a good excuse, since I was committed to several deadlines for writing projects I had to finish, but really I was afraid of failing to live up to the new bar I had set for my blog. This is amusing, really, since blogging is usually seen as a kind of no-holds-barred, free-flowing, let-your-thoughts-spill-out-on-the-page kind of activity. But just like with academic writing, it is easy to set oneself the goal of continually surpassing one’s previous writing, which can admittedly be very valuable - that is unless it completely paralyses one.Here, I want to follow up on my essay on analytic philosophy by highlighting a central flaw of analytic philosophy. While some of my readers are fellow philosophers or have read enough philosophy to be sufficiently familiar with the methods and goals of analytic philosophy, many are not. To the layperson who has heard of the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, analytic philosophy may simply represent clear and rigorous argumentation, whereas continental philosophy is associated with obscurity, metaphors, and unclear if any arguments. So coming out against analytic philosophy could easily be read as being against clear writing - which is, of course, not what I am against at all.Reading my previous essay, one might have come away with the conclusion that analytic philosophers do not draw sufficiently on, and have too little familiarity with, what goes on in the sciences. While that is true, it is not sufficient reason to reject analytic philosophy or to distinguish naturalistic philosophy as a third kind of philosophy altogether. More conservatively, one might read this argument as amounting merely to a call for analytic philosophers to learn more about science where it bears on the philosophical questions they are interested in.But the opposition between naturalistic philosophy and analytic philosophy runs deeper than that. There is a fundamental flaw in one of the central goals and methods of philosophy, namely the analysis of concepts.With the linguistic turn in the twentieth century, philosophers became less concerned with the world and more concerned with language. How do we use concepts? How do they represent things in the world? How can sentences be true or false? What is the meaning of particular words? Analytic philosophy as a discipline moved away from its origins in natural philosophy that once combined philosophy and science, and became something closer to linguistics… though, surprisingly enough, without actually engaging all that much with linguists. Indeed, one might have expected the linguistic turn to lead to a different merger altogether. A merger between linguistics and philosophy. But there are only a few attempts to really make this happen, such as MIT’s joint Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.In many areas of analytic philosophy today, the central questions concern how we should define particular terms. In the philosophy of medicine, for instance, the central debate is about how we should understand terms like ‘health’, ‘disease’, ‘pathology’, and the like. How do analytic philosophers usually approach this problem? They do so by introspecting, by asking themselves about the intuitions they have concerning these concepts, and by trying to come up with a definition that comes as close as possible to providing necessary and sufficient conditions. Commonly, philosophers assert that these intuitions reflect not only how they themselves think about particular terms (examples from other areas of philosophy include consciousness, knowledge, and morality), but more generally how competent language users in our society think about and use these terms.If this makes you raise an eyebrow, you are entirely justified. If we are interested in what the folk mean when they use a term, why should we ...
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