The Sooty Empiric

Here is a possibility I recommend for consideration: we ought hold ourselves to stricter argumentative standards than we often do, in our philosophical research manuscripts or public-forum presentations. Before getting into what I mean by this, why I think it, and why I am saying it now, it is worth saying a couple of things immediately. First, I am not claiming to have always or even often upheld my own ideals. Mea culpa. But let me at least try to stick to my own standards in this very blog post and explicitly say -- the first sentence should be considered a tentative suggestion, which I do not think I am in good position to establish with any great deal of confidence (or whatever the meta-ethically appropriate equivalent attitude to normative claims might be), and in general what is said in this blog post is just jotting down some thoughts that I accept are not presently all that probative and which contain a great many terms that stand in need of explication. Second, this does no...

There's a (perhaps apocryphal) story of a philosopher being asked at a party what exactly it was they did and responding -- ``you define a few concepts, you make a few distinctions; it's a living.'' People sometimes tell this story as an example of how base, flippant, and ignoble the culture of analytic philosophy has become; but I begin with it for the exact opposite reason. I want to acknowledge from the get go that, in the end, one of the big attractions to being a philosopher is that it's an indoor job with no heavy lifting, and that's alright. I'm not from the school of thought that thinks the problem with academics is that we fail to be sufficiently self-important, so I think it worth grounding all this vocation talk in the more humble reality straight away. Max Weber -- ``... Wait, did I leave the stove on?'' Max Weber has a rather famous essay called `Science as a Vocation'. In it he gives an account of the existential situation of ...