The Dogmas of Empiricism and the Linguistic Turn

Empiricisms ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Barry Allen
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Entire Line ◽  
Myth Of The Given ◽  
The Given

The chapter considers three lines of anti-empiricism in analytic philosophy: Quine and Davidson against the “dogmas of empiricism”; Sellars against the “myth of the given”; and Rorty’s new pragmatism, with its “higher nominalism” and disdain for radical empiricism. These anti-empiricism arguments were chiefly developed with Carnap in mind, and that is their weakness. The empiricism they criticize is theorematic rather than problematic, the empiricism of Russell and Carnap, not Epicurus or Newton. “Problematic” empiricisms like theirs, and including the work of the radical empiricists, are untouched by this entire line of criticism.

Rorty’s Rejection of Philosophy

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-30
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Education ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
The Real ◽  
Myth Of The Given ◽  
The Given ◽  
Philosophical Questions

Abstract I argue that the real puzzle about Richard Rorty’s intellectual development is not why he gave up on ‘analytic’ philosophy-he had never been much committed to that research agenda, even before it became moribund-but why, beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN), he gave up on the central concerns of philosophy going back to antiquity. In addition to Rorty’s published works, I draw on biographical information about Rorty’s undergraduate and graduate education to support this assessment, and contrast his rejection of philosophy with Nietzsche’s. Many contemporary philosophers influenced by Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction and Sellars’ attack on ‘the Myth of the Given’ (the two argumentative linchpins of PMN) did not abandon philosophical questions about truth, knowledge, and mind, they just concluded those questions needed to be naturalized, to be answered in conjunction with the empirical sciences. Why didn’t Rorty go this route? The paper concludes with some interesting anecdotes about Rorty that invite speculative explanations.

Metaphilosophical metamorphoses of analytic philosophy of language

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Szubka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Current State ◽  
First Philosophy ◽  
New Millennium

Abstract The paper begins with an account of the emergence of analytic philosophy of language in the twentieth century in the context of the development of logic and the linguistic turn. Subsequently, it describes two examples of analytic philosophy of language in its heyday when the discipline was conceived as first philosophy. Finally, it provides, by way of conclusion, a succinct outline of the current state of philosophy of language, marked by modesty and fragmentation. It is claimed that even if one retains optimism about the prospects of philosophy of language in the first century of the new millennium, it would be unreasonable to disagree with the opinion that the present-day philosophy of language is a highly specialized and diversified discipline and no longer so central for philosophical enterprise as it used to be.

scholarly journals The Breath of Sense: Language, Structure, and the Paradox of Origin

Konturen ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Paul M. Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Language Structure ◽  
Important Sense ◽  
History Of

Within contemporary analytic philosophy, at least, varieties of “naturalism” have attained a widespread dominance. In this essay I suggest, however, that a closer look at the history of the linguistic turn in philosophy can offer helpful terms for rethinking what we mean in applying the categories of “nature” and “culture” within a philosophical reflection on human life and practice. For, as I argue, the central experience of this history—namely, philosophy’s transformative encounter with what it envisions as the logical or conceptual structure of everyday language – also repeatedly demonstrates the existence of a fundamental aporia or paradox at the center of the claim of language upon an ordinary human life. I discuss the occurrence of this aporia, and attempts to resolve it, in the philosophical writing of Carnap, Quine, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and McDowell. I conclude that the prevailing naturalistic style in analytic philosophy, whatever its recommendations, is itself the outcome of an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the central aporia of twentieth-century philosophical reflection on language. Closer attention to this aporia reveals that language, as we find it in both theoretical and everyday reflection, is in the most important sense, neither essentially “natural” nor “cultural.”

Licht und Schatten der Begriffe

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Current Controversy ◽  
Myth Of The Given ◽  
The Given

AbstractWhen we regard Adorno’s philosophy against the background of the current controversy between constructivism and realism, his philosophy cannot be attributed to either side. In contrast to realism, an object is constituted by a concept; on the other hand, in contrast to constructivism, Adorno also considers a concept, in turn, to be constituted by the object. Comparing Adorno to Merleau-Ponty reveals that neither philosopher considers that the knowledge of an object can be gleaned from the subject’s unilateral constitution, but is based rather on reciprocity which becomes possible through the subject’s corporeality. Thus Adorno’s epistemology hints towards a way out of the inferentialistic immanence correlation of concepts, which avoids the myth of the given.

The myth of the given and realism

Erkenntnis ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raimo Tuomela
Keyword(s):  
Myth Of The Given ◽  
The Given

scholarly journals Of empty thoughts and blind intuitions Kant's answer to McDowell

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Günter Zöller
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
The Real ◽  
Myth Of The Given ◽  
Passive Data ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Given ◽  
Theoretical Philosophy

This paper examines the relation between intuition and concept in Kant in light of John McDowell's neo-Kantian position that intuitions are concept-laden.2 The focus is on Kant's twofold pronouncement that thoughts without content are empty and that intuitions without concepts are blind. I show that intuitions as singular representations are not instances of passive data intake but the result of synthetic unification of the given manifold of the senses by the power of the imagination under the guidance of the understanding. Against McDowell I argue that the amenability of intuitions to conceptual determination is not due some pre-existing, absolute conceptuality of the real but to the "work of the subject."3 On a more programmatic level, this paper seeks to demonstrate the limitations of a selective appropriation of Kant and the philosophical potential of a more comprehensive and thorough consideration of his work. Section 1 addresses the unique balance in Kant's philosophy between the work on particular problems and the orientation toward a systematic whole. Section 2 outlines McDowell's take on the Kantian distinction between intuition and concept in the context of the Kant readings by Sellars and Strawson. Section 3 exposes McDowell's relapse into the Myth of the Given. Section 4 proposes a reading of Kant's theoretical philosophy as an epistemology of metaphysical cognition. Section 5 details Kant's original account of sensible intuition in the Inaugural-Dissertation of 1770. Section 6 presents the transition from the manifold of the senses to the synthesis in the imagination and the unification through the categories in the Critique of pure reason (1781 and 1787). Section 7 addresses Kant's formalism in epistemology and metaphysics.

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