Die Philosophie ist keine Lehre, sondern eine Tätigkeit.
Ein philosophisches Werk besteht wesentlich aus Erläuterungen.
Wittgenstein[1]
Professional philosophy is to a great extent a huge factory for the manufacture of necessities – only necessities give us mental peace. It is no wonder that Wittgenstein arouses a certain hatred among us. He’s out to deprive us of our factory jobs.
Anscombe[2]
Rather than naming something unified, “analytic philosophy” should be understood as a family resemblance concept comprising a great variety of figures and movements (in a rather loose sense of the term), somehow held together by certain links of influence and (sometimes doctrinal but above all methodological or stylistic) affinities. Pretty much the same can be said of “continental philosophy”.
This rough sketch is made plausible by the fact that, though attempts to pin down the alleged distinctive features of analytic or continental philosophy have proved rather aimless, the task of identifying whether a certain thinker or text can be appropriately labelled as “analytic” or “continental” is a fairly unproblematic one on most occasions. Borderline cases, often the most interesting ones, can be considered a minority.
Perhaps the best way to put all this is by saying that the analytic-continental split in twentieth-century philosophy is something which has been quite prominently felt (and still is) within intellectual culture, which, no matter whether we deplore it or not, is more than enough to make it as real as it gets.
I am among those who deplore the split, and regard it as a most unfortunate breakdown in communication. Though maybe for different reasons, it seems to me that both analytic and continental philosophers are to be held responsible for it in more or less equal measures; Heidegger or Derrida are said to be charlatans at least as often as formal semantics or decision theory are said to be useless, being it clear that all such claims are as prejudiced (and ill-informed) as they are false.
There are a number of metaphilosophical opinions, i.e. opinions about the nature, tasks, and methods of the philosophical activity, which have greatly contributed not only to the analytic-continental split but also to further splits within what remains of the analytic tradition itself which are very often found implicitly or explicitly among those who can be thought of as today’s mainstream analytic philosophers. Such opinions are, as I see them, likely to function as inducers of confusion, as sources of dogmatism, and, perhaps above all, as conversation-stoppers. Scientism and a lack of historical and metaphilosophical self-consciousness are perhaps what holds them all together. They are at the present time too deeply entrenched to be brushed aside by a simple wave of the hand, and are simply taken for granted by many of those who happen to hold them. The list that follows should thus be taken as nothing but a reminder. (One to be assembled alongside many others.) Hopefully, a reminder that a revival of metaphilosophical debates, which have always struck me as being at the very heart of philosophy, would be most welcome.
Metaphilosophical issues are in turn inseparable from numerous other issues that have often been among the concerns of philosophers. So the following opinions are intimately tied to certain views about the nature of knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on, which seem to me equally problematic. Some are, of course, more problematic than others. I have decided to focus almost solely on metaphilosophical ones for I found this to be a suitable way to lay bare the skeleton, so to speak, of the general picture I have in mind, while at the same time making it relatively easy to see, for those familiar enough with these issues, what other philosophical views are implicit in it.[3]
§1. Philosophy is a natural kind, a discipline that, throughout the ages, has managed to dig down to the same deep, fundamental problems. And although they may come out dressed in different clothes in different periods of history, most of these problems are ultimately always about the same topics, such as, say, the nature of knowledge or reality, of truth or meaning, or of justice or the good.
§2. Philosophy is continuous with science, if not itself a special science, i.e. a sort of pre-science or science’s more abstract branch. It is thus a truth-seeking discipline, like the other (natural or social) sciences, and there is such a thing as philosophical knowledge.
§3. Though maybe not as spectacular as scientific progress, there is such a thing as philosophical progress in the sense of a continuous improvement, which consists in philosophers surpassing their predecessors by gradually coming closer to get things right, i.e. in getting more and more accurate accounts of how things really are.
§4. There is a sharp distinction between doing history of philosophy and doing philosophy proper. The former, a more humanistic discipline, consists mainly in assessing the works of philosophers of the past, the latter in problem-solving. Such a distinction is analogous to the one between science and the history of science.
§5. The whole history of philosophy (proper philosophy, at least) can be adequately summed up through an extensive catalogue of the great philosopher’s most important doctrines and arguments.
§6. Argument is the only acceptable way to support a philosophical view.
§7. Far from a mere consequence of more general institutional imperatives of specialisation and professionalisation, the fragmentation found in most of today’s analytic philosophy stems from the very nature of the subject. Great synoptic visions by a single philosopher have been recognized as utopian fantasies and are now a thing of the past. Like the modern scientist, today’s philosopher should have a particular area of expertise.
§8. Philosophy hence divides into a variety of largely autonomous and self-contained fields, each with its own body of knowledge and experts. It also divides into theoretical and practical philosophy.
§9. Metaphilosophy is nowhere near as central as, say, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, or ethics, arguably the core areas of philosophy since its very beginnings, not to mention others such as the philosophy of mind.
§10. Any respectable work in the philosophy of mind today must be informed by the latest results of neuroscientific research.
§11. Understanding is a process that can be encapsulated in a set of rules. Hence, it is plausible to assume that the verb “to understand” is being used analogously in both sentences “Father Zossima understands other people” or “Deep Blue understands the game of chess”.
§12. Ethics, aesthetics and religion are completely independent from each other.
§13. There can be entirely rational solutions to our most thorny moral dilemmas, one of the main tasks of moral philosophers being precisely that of devising carefully argued answers to such dilemmas and other related problems. Such answers, often arrived at through the application of a particular moral theory, should come in the form of a conclusion, a proposition telling us what is the right thing to do in such situations.
§14. Apart from specific fields such as aesthetics or the philosophy of art, which should focus mainly on definitions of “beauty” or “art”, philosophy has little relation to artistic activities such as literature.
§15. Unlike what is the case within analytic philosophy, people who focus on continental philosophy are not usually motivated by primarily cognitive interests. Hence, unlike analytic philosophers, continental ones tend to talk a lot of nonsense.
§16. The methods of so-called ideal language philosophy and ordinary language philosophy are not only competing but ultimately irreconcilable ones. And while the former approach has continued to flourish and remains crucial within certain branches of philosophy, the latter has been, if not altogether refuted, largely discredited and may therefore be ignored.
§17. Conceptual analysis is a fruitless task unless one is in command of a systematic theory of meaning. In fact, analysis is often dispensable, given that philosophers, being scientists of some sort (either armchair or experimental ones), should on most occasions go looking straight out at reality, instead of remaining stuck with problems of language (unless, of course, one is an expert in the philosophy of language and is concerned with problems belonging to that particular field).
§18. Either one holds on to the analytic-synthetic distinction, as well as to the scheme-content one, and to the idea that there is such a thing as a priori knowledge, or one has to accept that science is the only genuinely enlightening kind of inquiry that there is.
§19. It is crucial to distinguish carefully (and, hopefully, as sharply as possible) the real from the merely apparent, the necessary from the contingent, the a priori from the a posteriori, the natural from the conventional, the absolute from the relative, the objective from the subjective, the cognitive from the non-cognitive, the scientific from the non-scientific or pseudo-scientific, the mind from the world, and so on. When adequately drawn all these dichotomies do indeed bring fundamental light into philosophical inquiry.
§20. One of the main tasks of philosophy consists in seeking secure foundations for knowledge, morals, necessity, and so on. Those who are suspicious of this kind of aim should be considered relativists or at least as having relativistic inclinations.
In saying these opinions are potential conversation-stoppers (or, at least, conversation-obstructers or delayers) I am above all emphasizing that those who hold most (if not all) of them, i.e. who accept the general picture just sketched and work within its respective frameworks, are in danger of becoming (in case they are not already) “undesirably unconversable”[4] and hence of impoverishing the great ongoing conversation we call philosophy.
I am well aware of the fact that having put forward this list of opinions alongside a few bold claims, without any concern for further explanation or argument, may well strike some as a rather dogmatic, and most probably incoherent move. For while mainstream analytic philosophers cultivate airs of diplomacy and sophistication with their endless (often up to an almost perverse degree of detail) exchanges of arguments (or, at least, of noises that have the physiognomy of arguments), it may appear that I have done no more than dogmatically thump the table. And so, am I not the one who is ultimately doing the conversation harm? Against this, the most that I can allow myself to say here is that I have indeed thumped the table, but, while table-thumping will work as a conversation-stopper on most occasions, I hope that in this particular case it may as well work as a conversation-booster.
* Over thirty years ago, Elizabeth Anscombe delivered a short paper at a conference in Rome which was later published under the title “Twenty Opinions Common among Modern Anglo-American Philosophers”. In it, she set forth a list of views she saw as contrary to the Catholic faith but at the same time objectionable on purely philosophical grounds. Though exempting herself from providing any sort of argument on this particular occasion (she did, nonetheless, as one should have expected from her, provide such arguments elsewhere), she presents this list in such a powerful way that one may well get the feeling that she must somehow be right about at least the majority of them. The present paper is a tribute to “Twenty Opinions”, and intends to share two main features with it: its form, largely in imitation of Anscombe’s paper, and, more importantly, the spirit in which it is written, marked by a particular willingness to swim against the tide.
