[lit-ideas] Ordinary language metaphysics and talking donkeys
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2015 10:46:24 +0200
Interesting article.
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/35835/How_did_we_get_here_from_there.pdf
Opponents of analytic philosophy often associate it with logical
positivism. From a historical point of
view, it is clear that one main strand in the development of the broad
tradition known as ‘analytic
philosophy’ was indeed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, with
its austerely verificationist
principle of significance and its exclusion of metaphysics as cognitively
meaningless. Another main
strand in the development of the analytic tradition, ordinary language
philosophy, tended to be
almost equally suspicious of the ways in which metaphysicians made free
with ordinary words, far
from the everyday contexts of use on which their meaning was supposed to
depend. Despite that
history, however, recent decades have seen the growth and flourishing of
boldly speculative
metaphysics within the analytic tradition. Far from being inhibited by
logical positivist or ordinary
language scruples, such analytic metaphysics might be described by those
unsympathetic to it as
pre-critical, ranging far outside the domain of our experience, closer in
spirit to Leibniz than to Kant.
How did a species of philosophy with so much anti-metaphysics in its gene
pool evolve so
quickly to the opposite extreme?
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