Overgaard, S., Gilbert, P., & Burwood, S. (2013). An Introduction to Metaphilosophy (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Day 1
Rough Transcript: Philosophers examine subjects that claim to provide knowledge and understanding about the world. Part of the examination process is asking what a subject is and how it goes about providing that knowledge and understanding. Philosophy itself claims to provide knowledge and understanding about the world; Should it not then put itself through the same examination process as other subjects? Metaphilosophy is the inquiry into the nature of philosophical questions and the methods adopted in answering them… According to Colin McGinn it is ‘perhaps the most undeveloped part of philosophy’. One of the traps of being a philosopher is taking for granted our world view and Not putting it under scruitny. Is it necessary for every philosopher to do this? This book will dive deepr into this these topics
Day 2
Rough Transcript: what is philosophy? When we ask what philosophy is, should we simply give a descrption of what philosophers today do on a day to day basis? In that case Philosophy hasn’t always been what philosophy is currently. Does this mean that we shouldn’t count philosophers of the past as philosophers? Philosophy has changed a lot since the days of Plato, yet most people would consider him a philosopher…so should we then just describe what they SHOULD be doing instead? There is no consensus currently on what philosophy is or what it ought to be. Is this a problem? Is this the reason that it isnt making the kind of progress that 1the other sciences are making? Is it the origin of new sciences or is it a part of science? Should we be looking to philosophy for the answers to the big questions in life, or should it simply help us understand what we already kn1ow? Has science solved all of the problems that philosophy is good for? Do we have anything left to discover which science alone cant discover with time. Are we at the doorstep of knowing-it-all? There are those who think so.
Day 3
Transcript: With the success of science over the past century there has been a rise in influential thinkers who have declared that philosophy is dead. One such person is Stephen Hawkig. It is hard to argue that there is a more effective way of finding out facts about the world and coming up with explanations of how the world works than science. With the introduction of systemized methods of observation and experimentation the world changed. Before these methods were introduced, most philosophers were speculating about ideas without having to put them to the test. Afterwards, the topics that philosophers were merely contemplating became the subjects of scrutiny by scientists. This scrutiny led to a lot of insight and progress…Some which philosophers were involved in. Lately however scientists appear to be carrying the torch when it come to progress, while philosophers are left to speculate about the topics which are unobservable and unmeasurable. Is this all that is left for a philosopher to do? If so, is anything wrong with that?
Day 4
Compared to science, Philosophy appears to have made very little progress over the course of the last few centuries. Several reasons have been put forth as to the reason why? One of them is: philosophers lack the capacity to achieve consensus. Progress requires a group to agree that the ideas put forth in the past are good enough to get us where we need to go… and all that is left to do is refine those agreed upon ideas until we get there. Refining ideas, that are decent ,does tend to yield results…one example is that we gain a better understanding of the nature of the problem over time and another is that we develop better and better ways of dealing with obstacles that surround that specific problem. The authors cite progress made in logic with the formalization of symbolic logic as one of the great examples of this process at work in philosophy. Is this a special case, and if so is progress possible in the other branches of Philosophy?
Day 5
Are philosophers overly crictical…should philosophers change their behavior to mirror that of scientists so that they can deliver similar outcomes. What would it even look like for philosohy to make rapid progress? And Would the topics being discussed be philosophical in nature if achieving consensus quickly was possible? Or, is the role of Philosophy in the world inherently different from that of science? Overgard and Co point out that even though the modes of arguments in philosophy aren’t uniquely adversarial they should facilitate disagreement. Philosophers are expected to be comfortable with disagreement and be more interested gaining insight in discourse than victory. If a philosopher is employing slights of hand to get ahead is she really a philosopher? Whether the criticisms of philosophers are valid or not, their disagreements do tend to make the price of maintaining certain positions clearer and clearer over time…so anyone that wishes to defend a particular position can easily find out what they are getting themselves into…this can be seen as a progress of sorts
Day 6
Overgaard and Co authors discuss a thought experiment in which Aristotle time travels to a present day university. He attends classes given by the different departments to get a taste for the amount of progress that has occurred over the millenia. He attends physics lectures and is baffled by the concepts being discussed, cosmology? Same thing? Biology? Same thing. Things take a turn when he starts attending Philosophy lectures. Not only does he understand, but he is able to make insightful contributions to the discourse when it comes to topics like metaphysics and ethics. The progress made by science is pretty much undeniable. But what role is left for philosophers like Aristotole to play in a world dominated by the undeniable greatness of science? Some philosophers have turned to ontological naturalism…a world view in which there are no super natural forces, disembodied, or immaterial spirits directing the course of events…therefore there is nothing that is not observable and accessible through the methods of the emperical sciences. Ontological naturalist philosophers accept as fact that the identification and description of reality is best left to the natural sciences , not speculative metaphysics. Overgaard and company posit that the idea that there is nothing left for philosophers to do in this world would only need to be true if there was a commitment to methodolical naturalism. The view that the only way to say something meaningful about the world is by employing the methods of the natural sciencs.
Day 8
Overgaard and company go on to discuss whether ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism must necessarily go hand in hand. They use Wittgenstein to show that intuition and outside of the box thinking can lead to accurate insights. Although what Wittgenstein was doing in his studies on language might seem anthropological in nature, and therefore scientific,, he never went around setting up experiments or observing people to gain his insights. Infact he never utilized the methods provided by science at all. He simply acknowledged facts about the world which were being taken for granted by a particular world view, and as a result was able to give a more complete description of it. Overgaard and company state that this is explicitly the role that Wittgenstein saw for philosophers. Not offering up theories or explanations about the world, but a more complete description that takes into account even the most basic assumptions. In Wittgenstein’s own words, “Don’t think, but look!” He argues that clarifi is the role of Philosophy and the discovery of new facts will do little to resolve problems that are conceptual in nature.
Day 9
How valuable are the descriptions that science gives us about the world when compared to the image of the world that we see when we look out? Overgaard and company use a quote from Eddington’s the nature of the physical world to make the point that, the world that the average person sees when they look out, is just as important to acknowledge in our theories, as our scientific descriptions… that is if we want our theoretical understanding of the world to have any relation to the world that we know then we need to incorporate a common sense approach. What we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel need be incorporated into scientists’ explanations of the world and vice versa. This approach would leave significant room for philosophers to operat; A philosopher’s input would be just as crictical to our understanding of the world as the periodic table in this world view… all without having to abandon naturalism. But at what cost are we ignoring science’s revelations about reality just appeal to the familiarworld in which we exist?
Day 10
Earlier in this series we broadly defined ontological naturalism as the view that the natural world is all that exists…there are no supernatural or unobservable entities influencing the way in which events unfold in this world view. This outlook is usually coupled with methodological naturalism which limits the way in which we can go about attempting to gain knowledge…to science. There is arguably no better way to describe and explain events and phenomena in the natural world than science. Science gives us a detached access to reality that is independent of our limited senses As the methods deployed by scientists are refined over time…is there any room for philosophers to make contributions without abandoning the traditional methods of Philosophy. Overgaard and company state that once science and theology which were at one time intertwined with philosophy started traveling down their own paths philosophy was left with the task of understanding people. Are the detached classifications and explanations of love given by science, for example, satisfying enough to a person who has fallen in love….or is explaining love to this person the role of the humanities…and if so is philosophy in particular a part of the humanities? Or Is philosophy a second order discipline that reflects on how we represent reality itself through our language, ideas, and perceptionas.
