Between the old metaphysics and the new empiricism: Collingwood's defence of the autonomy of philosophy

Collingwood has failed to make a significant impact in the history of twentieth century philosophy either because he has been dismissed as a dusty old idealist committed to the very metaphysics the analytical school was trying to leave behind, or because his later work has been interpreted as advocating the dissolution of philosophy into history. I argue that Collingwood’s key philosophical works are a sustained attempt to defend the view that philosophy is an autonomous discipline with a distinctive domain of inquiry and that Collingwood’s attempt to defend the autonomy of philosophy is intimately connected to his defence of intensional notions against the kind of meaning scepticism which came to prevail from the 1920s. I defend the philosophical claim that there is a third way between the idealist metaphysics with which Collingwood is often associated and the neo-empiricist agenda which characterised analytic philosophy in mid-century by defending the hermeneutic thesis that Collingwood’s work is a sustained attempt to articulate a conception of philosophy as an epistemologically first science. Since there is a via media between the old metaphysics and the new empiricism there is no need to choose between a certain kind of armchair metaphysics and a scientifically informed ontology

Reason within the limits of religion alone: Hamann’s onto-Christology

Accepted manuscrip

A defence of Hart's semantics as nonambitious conceptual analysis

Two methodological claims in Hart's The Concept of Law have produced perplexity: that it is a book on “analytic jurisprudence” 1 and that it may also be regarded as an essay in “descriptive sociology.” 2 Are these two ideas reconcilable? We know that mere analysis of our legal concepts cannot tell us much about their properties, that is, about the empirical aspect of law. We have learned this from philosophical criticisms of conceptual analysis; yet Hart informs us that analytic jurisprudence can be reconciled with descriptive sociology. The answer to this puzzle lies in the notion of nonambitious conceptual analysis. The theorist analyzes concepts but accepts the limitations of conceptual analysis and therefore uses empirical knowledge and substantive arguments to explain, refine, or perhaps refute initial insights provided by intuitions. This is the conclusion that this paper arrives at as an argumentative strategy to defend Hart's legal theory from the criticisms of Stavropoulos and Dworkin. The latter argues that Hart's legal theory cannot explain theoretical disagreements in law because he relies on a shared criterial semantics. Stavropoulos aims to show that Hart's semantics is committed to ambitious conceptual analysis and relies on the usage of our words as a standard of correctness. Both attacks aim to show that the semantic sting stings Hart's legal theory. This essay refines both challenges and concludes that not even in the light of the most charitable interpretation of these criticisms is Hart's legal theory stung by the semantic sting. This study defends the view that Hart's methodological claims were modest and that he was aware of the limits of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method. He was, this study claims, far ahead of his time. 1 H.L.A Hart, THE CONCEPT OF LAW (1994). 2 Id

The meaning of meaning-fallibilism

Much discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. ‘infallibilism’) with respect to what one’s terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientists’ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some extent, this new dimension to the meaning of terms such as ‘water’ is yet to receive a principled epistemological undergirding (beyond the deliverances of ‘intuition’ with respect to certain somewhat unusual possible worlds). Charles Peirce’s distinctive, naturalistic philosophy of language is mined to provide a more thoroughly fallibilist, and thus more realist, approach to meaning, with the requisite epistemology. Both his pragmatism and his triadic account of representation, it is argued, produce an original approach to meaning, analysing it in processual rather than objectual terms, and opening a distinction between ‘meaning for us’, the meaning a term has at any given time for any given community and ‘meaning simpliciter’, the way use of a given term develops over time (often due to a posteriori input from the world which is unable to be anticipated in advance). This account provocatively undermines a certain distinction between ‘semantics’ and ‘ontology’ which is often taken for granted in discussions of realism

Logic in Action: Wittgenstein's Logical Pragmatism and the Impotence of Scepticism

‘The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com '. Copyright Blackwell Publishing. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9205.00291Peer reviewe

There is Nothing It is Like to See Red: Holism and Subjective Experience

The Nagel inspired “something-it-is-like” (SIL) conception of conscious experience remains a dominant approach in philosophy. In this paper I criticize a prevalent philosophical construal of SIL consciousness, one that understands SIL as a property of mental states rather than entities as a whole. I argue against thinking of SIL as a property of states, showing how such a view is in fact prevalent, under-warranted, and philosophically pernicious in that it often leads to an implausible reduction of conscious experience to qualia. I then develop a holistic conception of SIL for entities (not states) and argue that it has at least equal pre-empirical warrant, is more conservative philosophically in that it decides less from the a priori “armchair,” and enjoys a fruitful two-way relationship with empirical work

The Need for Empirically-Led Synthetic Philosophy

The problem of unifying knowledge represents the frontier between science and philosophy. Science approaches the problem analytically bottom-up whereas, prior to the end of the nineteenth century, philosophy approached the problem synthetically top-down. In the late nineteenth century, the approach of speculative metaphysics was rejected outright by science. Unfortunately, in the rush for science to break with speculative metaphysics, synthetic or top-down philosophy as a whole was rejected. This meant not only the rejection of speculative metaphysics, but also the implicit rejection of empirically-led synthetic philosophy and the philosophy of nature. Since a change in the paradigm of science requires a change in the philosophy of nature underpinning science, the rejection of the philosophy of nature closes science to the possibility of a paradigm change. Given the foundational problems faced by science, there is a need for empirically-led synthetic philosophy in order to discover a new empirically-based philosophy of nature. Such a philosophy of nature may open science to the possibility of a paradigm change