资源描述
Click to edit Master title style,Click to edit Master text styles,Second level,Third level,Fourth level,Fifth level,*,Philosophy Today,Philosophy 1,Spring,2002,G.J.Mattey,The Great Divide,Most contemporary philosophers follow one of two approaches,“Continental philosophy,“Analytic philosophy,Continental philosophy is more influential on the European continent,Analytic philosophy is predominant in the major research universities in the English-speaking world,Analytic Philosophy,Analytic philosophy developed from attempts in the early 20,th,century to make our concepts precise,The model of this procedure was science,Rudolf Carnap(1891-1970)was a leading positivist,who held that what is not analytic or scientifically verifiable is meaningless,Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889-1951)eventually held that analyses do not yield precise results and held that philosophy is merely therapeutic,Analytic Philosophy Today,Emphasis in contemporary analytic philosophy is on language and meaning,and meaning is understood as a relation between language and objective reality,Thus,understanding the structure of language is what reveals the structure of reality,We now have powerful symbolic tools to aid us,Saul Kripke(1940-)led a revival of metaphysics by making hyper-scientific concepts precise,Continental Philosophy,Immanuel Kants“Copernican revolution made the human point of view primary,This revolution was carried on German philosophers in the 19th century,culminating in Nietzsche,In the early 20th century,Edmund Husserl invented“phenomenology,This was developed by Martin Heidegger and Sartre into“existentialism,Continental Philosophy Today,Work in phenomenology and existentialism continues to be done,The main thrust in continental philosophy today follows Nietzsche,Michel Foucault(1926-1984)understood knowledge as practice,and practice as based on relations of power,Jacques Derrida(1930-)promotes“deconstruction and opposes“logocentrism,Academic Culture Clash,Analytic philosophers accuse continental philosophers of sloppy,or even meaningless,thinking,Continental philosophers accuse analytic philosophers of petty narrowness and detachment from real human concerns,Roots of the Clash,The clash between contemporary continental and analytic philosophers is foreshadowed in the clash between the Sophists and Socrates,The Sophists emphasized the use of language as a tool to further human interest,but not as revealing an objective reality,Socrates demanded an account of the real form which provides the meaning of the use of concepts,Formal Philosophy,Symbolic logic allows the formulation of philosophical statements and arguments in a rigorous,unambiguous format,Leibniz was the first philosopher to try this,Russells 1905“On Denoting showed its great potential,Probability calculus is a formalization of principles of inductive reasoning,Decision theory is based on probability calculus,What Analytic Philosophers Do,Conceptual analysis is done in the style of the,Euthyphro,E.g.,knowledge is justified true belief that is not accidental,Philosophical theories are constructed in the style of,Utilitarianism,or,Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals,Much activity is directed at the question of the possibility of analysis and theorizing,Reflective Equilibrium,Mill posed the problem of the analysis of ethical judgments,We need to know what right and wrong are before we can judge an act right or wrong,But scientific method requires that we know particulars first,Nelson Goodman proposed a solution,Begin with our beliefs about particulars,Determine how well they conform to general beliefs,Reflectively adjust the two kinds of beliefs until they reach a state of equilibrium,Issues in Metaphysics,Most current issues in analytic metaphysics are the same as the classical issues,Are universals and numbers real,or are concrete particulars the only reality?,Is causality only constant conjunction or a real relation?,Can things be other than what they actually are,or are they determined to be what they are?,Supervenience,Many philosophers are attracted to the view that the human mind is a material entity,But there are problems in explaining mental activity as identical to brain states,etc.,A proposed solution is that mental activity supervenes on physical states of the body,Two brain states of the same type cannot differ with respect to the associated mental activity,Issues in Epistemology,How should knowledge be analyzed?,Should we approach knowledge inside-out(Descartes,Hume,Russell)or outside-in,so that human knowledge is a natural development to be studied scientifically?,How do we make sense of the persuasive power of philosophical skepticism?,Contextualism,We seem to assume that we have knowledge ordinarily but take back that assumption when thinking of skeptical arguments,This can be explained by claiming that we have knowledge in the ordinary context but lose it in the skeptical context,This is similar to Humes view that we have belief in the ordinary context
展开阅读全文