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Scholarship on Plato's dialogues persistently divides its focus between the dramatic or literary and the philosophical or argumentative dimensions of the texts. But this hermeneutic division of labor is naïve, for Plato's arguments are embedded in dramatic dialogues and developed through complex, largely informal exchanges between literary characters. Consequently, it is questionable how readers can even attribute arguments and theses to the author himself. The answer to this question lies in transcending the scholarly divide and integrating the literary and philosophical dimensions of the texts. This is the task of Trials of Reason.

The study focuses on a set of fourteen so-called early dialogues, beginning with a methodological framework that explains how to integrate the argumentation and the drama in these texts. Unlike most canonical philosophical works, the early dialogues do not merely express the results of the practice of philosophy. Rather, they dramatize philosophy as a kind of motivation, the desire for knowledge of goodness, and as a discursive practice, motivated by this desire and ideally governed by reason. And they dramatize the trials to which desire and reason are subject, that is, the difficulties of realizing philosophy as a form of motivation, a practice, and an epistemic achievement. In short, Trials of Reason argues that Plato's early dialogues are as much works of metaphilosophy as philosophy itself.

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases. This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: Only if philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence are data about non-philosophers’ intuitions of any interest to us. Our alleged reliance on the intuitive makes many philosophers who don’t work on meta-philosophy concerned about their own discipline: they are unsure what intuitions are and whether they can carry the evidential weight we allegedly assign to them. The goal of this book is to argue that this concern is unwarranted since the claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively (or even a little bit) on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of ‘intuition’-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: It has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

Conceptual analysis is currently out of favour, especially in North America. This is partly through misunderstanding of its nature. Properly understood, conceptual analysis is not a mysterious activity discredited by Quine that seeks after the a priori in some hard‐to‐understand sense. It is, rather, something familiar to everyone, philosophers and non‐philosophers alike—or so I argue. Another reason for its unpopularity is a failure to appreciate the need for conceptual analysis. The cost of repudiating it has not been sufficiently appreciated; without it, we cannot address a whole raft of important questions.

I have always been suspicious of excessively abstract theorizing in philosophy. I think that an important test of metaphilosophical claims is whether they make good sense in the context of particular problems. The discussion in the book is, accordingly, anchored in particular philosophical debates. The basic framework is developed in the first three chapters via a consideration of the role of conceptual analysis in the debate over the doctrine in metaphysics known as physicalism, with digressions on free will, meaning, personal identity, motion, and change, and then applied in the last three chapters to current debates over colour and ethics.

This book develops an interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later writings (in particular, his Philosophical Investigations) that differs in substantial respects from what can already be found in the literature. For it is argued here that his fundamental idea is not a new conception of language (as most commentators have supposed), but rather a revolutionary conception of what philosophy is — one that is opposed to the construction of philosophical theories. This idea is what lies behind Wittgenstein's distinctive treatments of specific issues within the subject: issues concerning language, the mind, mathematics, knowledge, art, religion, and so on. Thus the first aim of the present work is to preset a clear and compelling account of his meta-perspective, to explain and justify his view of how philosophy should (and should not) be conducted, and of what it might achieve. The second aim is to defend that view against a variety of objections, and thereby to display its virtues, not merely as an accurate reading of Wittgenstein, but as a good analysis of philosophy itself. The third aim is to examine its application to a wide collection of particular topics, but most thoroughly to meaning and to experience. The centrality of Wittgenstein's metaphilosophy and its susceptibility to rigorous articulation and rational support are admittedly controversial assumptions, but they are vindicated here — not just textually, but by the power and plausibility of the philosophy that results from them. Thus the book simultaneously offers a fresh account of Wittgenstein's thought and dramatically deflationary picture of the entire subject.

Heidegger's early ‘fundamental ontology’ offers a vision of our subjectivity and of the world we inhabit that can appear to be simply truer to life. It allows us to understand the creature that thinks as also one which acts, moves, even touches the world around it — a creature at home in the same ordinary world in which we too live our lives when outside of the philosophical closet. It also promises to free us from seemingly intractable philosophical problems, such as scepticism about the external world. But many of the concepts central to that vision are elusive; and some of the most widely accepted interpretations of Heidegger's vision harbour within themselves deep and important unclarities, while others foist upon us hopeless species of idealism. This book offers a new way of understanding that vision. Drawing on an examination of Heidegger's work throughout the 1920s, it takes as central to that vision the proposals that propositional thought presupposes a mastery of what might be called a ‘measure’, and that mastery of such a ‘measure’ requires a recognizably ‘worldly’ subject. These insights provide the basis for a novel reading of key elements of Heidegger's ‘fundamental ontology’, including his concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’, his critique of scepticism, his claim to disavow both realism and idealism, and his difficult reflections on the nature of truth, science, authenticity, and philosophy itself. According to this interpretation, Heidegger's central ideas identify genuine demands that we must meet if we are to achieve the feat of thinking determinate thoughts about the world around us.

Since the rise of analytical philosophy, the relation of philosophy and its past is more hotly debated among philosophers than ever. Some scholars analyse historical texts without reference to current debates and their terminology, while others pursue first-order philosophy by focusing on problems instead of doxography—that is, without reference to their predecessors. A growing group, though, doubts that philosophy can be studied effectively on the basis of this sharp division. But does the study of the history of philosophy contribute to current philosophy? And, if it does, what precisely is the contribution? Does making such a contribution depend on using a specific method which determines how the historical perspective is related to systematic philosophy and philosophy in general? More generally, how do our assumptions about the relationship between historical and systematic perspectives affect our methodology and metaphilosophy or philosophy of philosophy? This volume presents and debates answers to these questions, which deserve to be addressed in their own right and not just as an adjunct to other discussions. The contributors of this volume provide diverse answers based on historical references, stretching from ancient philosophy to the most current debates, and also refer to various philosophical sub-disciplines.

This book is a defense of the methods of analytic philosophy against a recent empirical challenge to the soundness of those methods. The challenge is raised by practitioners of “experimental philosophy” (xphi) and concerns the extent to which analytic philosophy relies on intuition—in particular, the extent to which analytic philosophers treat intuitions as evidence in arguing for philosophical conclusions. Experimental philosophers say that analytic philosophers place a great deal of evidential weight on people’s intuitions about hypothetical cases and thought experiments. This book argues that this view of traditional philosophical method is a myth, part of “metaphilosophical folklore.” Analytic philosophy makes regular use of hypothetical examples and thought experiments, but philosophers argue for their claims about what is true or not true in these examples and thought experiments. It is these arguments, not intuitions, that are treated as evidence for the claims. The book discusses xphi and some recent xphi studies; critiques a variety of other metaphilosophical claims; examines such famous arguments as Gettier’s refutation of the JTB (justified true belief) theory and Kripke’s Gödel Case argument against descriptivism about proper names, and shows that they rely on reasoning rather than intuition; and finds existing critiques of xphi, the “Multiple Concepts” and “Expertise” replies, to be severely lacking.

What are intuitions? Should we ever trust them? And if so, when? Do they have an indispensable role in science, e.g. in thought experiments, as well as in philosophy? Or should appeal to intuitions be abandoned altogether? This book brings together leading early- to late-career philosophers, to tackle such questions. It presents state-of-the-art thinking on the topic. The chapters in the first part of the book discuss the epistemological and metaphysical standing of intuitions; the chapters in the second part look at how intuitions are used in disciplines besides philosophy, and in sub-disciplines of philosophy; the chapters in the final part consider the challenges to intuitions-driven philosophy from experimental philosophy and contemporary analytic metaphysics.

From speculative theology to the exegesis of Aquinas, to contemporary North American philosophy and Catholic social and ethical thought, to the thought of Benedict XVI, this book argues the crucial importance of the proportionate natural end within the context of grace and supernatural beatitude. It argues that, in the effort to avoid naturalism, Henri de Lubac unwittingly consummated the loss of nature as a normative principle within theology, both doctrinally and exegetically with respect to the teaching of Aquinas. TIt argues that this constitutes an understandable but grave error. De Lubac's view of the matter was adopted and extended by Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Theology of Karl Barth, in which Balthasar argues that Aquinas could not even consider pure nature because it was “impossible for him even to make the conceptual distinction implied by this problem” — a view contradicted by Aquinas's text. The book argues that Balthasar's account evacuates nature of its specific ontological density and treats it as “mere createdness as such,” a kind of dimensionless point terminating the line of grace. Given the loss of natural within theological method, its recovery requires philosophic instrumentalities. In its third chapter this book argues that by reason of its lack of any unified philosophy of nature or metaphysics, the analytic thought so widespread in Anglophone circles is merely a partial metaphilosophy and so cannot replace the role of classical Thomism within theology. The fourth chapter argues against those who construe affirmation of a proportionate natural end as equivalent to social Pelagianism or minimalism in the public square, engaging the work of Jacques Maritain, Jean Porter, and David Schindler Sr.