Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Analytic Philosophy

  • A Pragmatic Option

    by Jay Jeffers ____ American Pragmatism has been controversial from the start. It was accused of “cosmic impiety” by Bertrand Russell, a founding father of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Rifts developed quickly even within the young school of thought, with the original pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce renaming his approach “pragmaticism,” which he thought was “ugly enough…

  • Truth Rediscovered: A Humanistic View of Rationality

    By Jay Jeffers ___ The Buddha said, “Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” Or maybe he didn’t. Scholars would have to chime in on the popular interpretation through the lens of history, linguistics, and the like. Either way it’s a vivid quote. The real problem isn’t whether or…

  • Wittgenstein and Woke Philosophy

    by Bharath Vallabha ___ Since I was a philosophy undergrad 25 years ago, I wanted academic philosophy to be more diverse. Back then, at least in the departments I was in, most philosophy professors and students were white males, and the curriculum was almost entirely European. What most bugged me was this was so taken…

  • Psychologizing Philosophy

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ I stand with Friedrich Nietzsche and William James when (albeit in different ways) they arrive at a similar position: a person’s philosophy reflects their temperament. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggested that every philosophy is “the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography.” In Pragmatism,…

  • Linguistic Discrimination

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ___ In 2013, an Argentinian philosopher working in the UK argued that analytic philosophers should publish in English rather than in their native tongue. [1] It looks like many have heeded his advice. This year, some institutions and scholars adopted the Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy (BP), which aim to…

  • Endgame

    E. John Winner ___ This essay is a response generally to an article Dan Kaufman posted here at EA [https://theelectricagora.com/2021/10/14/some-cranky-thoughts-on-philosophers/], and in some ways also to some implications embedded in comments on that article by Robert Gressis, which extend the problems Dan noted beyond philosophy departments to include the whole of the Humanities and even…

  • In Defense of Philosophy: Analytic, Pragmatist, and Transcendental

    by Preston Stovall ____ [1] In a recent essay that got some attention in online circles in philosophy, Liam Kofi Bright foretold the end of analytic philosophy – characterizing it as a degenerating research program – and the exhaustion of a Kripkean understanding of what analytic philosophy has been up to. While reading Liam’s essay,…

  • A Defense of Knowing Nothing

    by Robert Gressis ___ Introduction In this essay, I argue against the idea that in order to count as knowing some proposition P, P should be true, you have to believe P, and you should have some justification for believing P. I have several arguments for this view, but honestly, I don’t need any because…

  • How To Write Like an Analytic Philosopher

    by Paul Austin Murphy ___ There certainly is a specific prose style when it comes to much analytic philosophy. Of course there’s a general academic prose style (or prose styles) too. The analytic philosophy prose style can therefore be taken to be a variation on that. Academics will of course say – and justifiably so…

  • The Analytic/Continental Split

    by Daniel A. Kaufman My discussion with Crispin Sartwell on the Analytic/Continental divide.  Originally aired on the Sophia program, MeaningofLife.TV., April 10, 2019.