Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:24th Jun '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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- Hardback£84.00(9780198807520)
In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should re-orient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors. Any resolution to many of these contemporary issues would require an epistemic access to metaphysical possibilities and necessities, which, Machery argues, we do not have. In effect, then, Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds defends a form of modal skepticism. The book assesses the main philosophical method for acquiring the modal knowledge that the resolution of modally immodest philosophical issues turns on: the method of cases, that is, the consideration of actual or hypothetical situations (which cases or thought experiments describe) in order to determine what facts hold in these situations. Canvassing the extensive work done by experimental philosophers over the last 15 years, Edouard Machery shows that the method of cases is unreliable and should be rejected. Importantly, the dismissal of modally immodest philosophical issues is no cause for despair - many important philosophical issues remain within our epistemic reach. In particular, reorienting the course of philosophy would free time and resources for bringing back to prominence a once-central intellectual endeavor: conceptual analysis.
The book is bold, provocative, engaging, ambitious and well written. * Herman Cappelen, Philosophical Studies *
what Machery presents is a manifesto -- a tightly-and-powerfully-argued, eminently readable, innovative manifesto -- for the X-Phi movement rather than a full-blown evidence-based policy. However, unlike the majority of contemporary political manifestos, it deserves to be taken seriously. By consolidating findings drawn from individual experimental studies, by incorporating various approaches to experimental philosophy and by advocating a particular picture of what the future of 'positive-X-Phi' could look like, this book serves not only as the foundations on which experimental philosophers can build, but as a provocative challenge to more common approaches to theorising in the tradition of analytic philosophy. * Jonathan Lewis, Metapsychology *
'In advocating the need for a modest approach to philosophical enquiry, this book will be a valuable resource for those wishing to engage with the empirical challenge that experimental philosophy claims to represent . . . It presents a manifesto for an experimental philosophy which can do important positive philosophical work motivated by an empirical dissatisfaction with the more traditional methods and aims of philosophy, and it also offers a picture of experimental philosophy as an empirical cognitive science which is, by the same token, conceptual analysis..' * James Andow, LSE Review of Books *
ISBN: 9780198825883
Dimensions: 235mm x 154mm x 16mm
Weight: 432g
288 pages