What Can Analytic Philosophy Teach Us?

A lot!

I recently spoke with

Dan Williams

of Conspicuous Cognition fame. It was a very nice chat; Dan is quite smart and thoughtful, and had lots of interesting things to say. I highly recommend you check out his blog. We agreed about lots of stuff, but the primary thing we disagreed about was the value of analytic philosophy.

I’m quite bullish on our ability to learn lots of things through analytic philosophy. Not only are the tools of analytic philosophy capable, in principle, of teaching us interesting things, I think they have taught us loads of interesting things! Dan, in contrast, thinks that analytic philosophy doesn’t have the ability to teach us very much—that it ought to take a backseat to the sciences and empirical methods. His broad worries were primarily: