What are the proper aims and methods of philosophy? What is philosophy trying to accomplish, and how does it go about accomplishing it? A survey of the history of philosophy and current discussions regarding its aims and methods shows that philosophers radically disagree about the nature of philosophical inquiry. Part of the reason for this observation is that the aims and methods of philosophy are themselves philosophical topics. My task in meta-philosophy is to understand the nature of philosophy given that there is no distinct subject matter, and its aims and methods are subject to philosophical dispute; philosophy is an essentially divided discipline. Philosophers today and throughout history have supposed that philosophy is a scientific discipline; however, if my thesis is correct, philosophy cannot be a science. The first step is to appreciate the diversity of philosophical aims and methods; some aims and methods in philosophy directly contradict each other. Unlike science, which proceeds on the basis of a general universal methodology, philosophy is incapable of making scientific progress due to a radical methodological controversy at the very heart of the discipline. I recommend that, instead of attempting to merge with the aims and methods of science, philosophy should distinguish itself from science, and be understood as a different kind of discipline altogether. Once we reject the scientific meta-philosophical conception of philosophy, we can begin speculating and reconstructing the identity of philosophy from within philosophy itself.

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This thesis aims to provide a new definition for philosophy rooted in MacIntyre’s account of a “practice”. In the first chapter, I explain MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as it appears in After Virtue—including its critical components, namely, internal goods, standards of excellence, and the historical dimension of practices—through a consideration of the practice of guitar lutherie. I then use this account to build up an initial definition of philosophy as a practice, and briefly clarify two minor confusions that could easily arise regarding such an account. In my second chapter, I take up MacIntyre’s view that practices are always spatiotemporally situated in order to question whether or not my definition from Chapter One could include non-Western philosophy within it. I argue that this is possible within the peculiar epistemic conditions of modernity, based on a reading of MacIntyre’s paper “Relativism, Power and Philosophy”. In Chapter Three, I consider another key component of MacIntyre’s account—namely, that of institutions—and arrive at some extra qualifications regarding the concepts of both “external goods” and “corruption” to deepen the account, and then introduce my own concept of “institutional hegemony” to account for academia’s present status with regards to the practice of philosophy, which I use to explain a discordance between the present reality of philosophy as a discipline and the conclusions I draw in Chapter Two. I then extend this line of thought in the fourth chapter to look at some objections that could be made against a MacIntyrean view of philosophy-as-a-practice from a feminist and postcolonial lens. These objections are then addressed in the fifth chapter, where I show that the MacIntyrean ought to be in agreement with the feminist and postcolonial projects, and that the MacIntyrean framework can indeed accommodate them.

While naturalism is said to be the oldest and most popular view among contemporary philosophers and scientists, serious and pervasive questions linger concerning its nature, norms, goals, and status. I critically assess these issues in defending a metaphilosophy of naturalism. I begin in arguing that naturalism is neither a trivial nor empty worldview suffering from a lack of cohesion or content. In support of this, I develop a typology of naturalism from which I extract three “core” commitments exemplified by nearly all forms of the doctrine. I thus provide some preliminary, non-arbitrary grounds for the naturalist to defend the thesis from many objections. In the second chapter, I address the fundamental ontological commitments of metaphysical naturalism. Problems with defining naturalism are connected to the many ways these notions are understood, and I defend account of what it is for an entity, process, phenomenon, etc. to be natural or occur naturally. In furtherance of this, I defend in Chapters 3 and 4 an analysis of nature according to its two primary senses: The first is the particular sense, as picked out in claims referring to the nature of some entity, and the second is the universal sense, as is picked out in reference to nature itself. For both primary senses, I assess various arguments for acosmism, the thesis that nature does not exist (in either sense). In response to these challenges, I argue that the concept of nature in both senses is theoretically and ontologically fundamental, and thus indispensable to philosophy and science. The penultimate chapter constitutes an analysis of the relationship between naturalism and physicalism. I argue that even if the basic principles upon which physicalism rests are true, they nevertheless highly questionable and problematic. I connect and resolve these issues with an assessment of the relations between them and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. I conclude the chapter with an account of naturalization. In the final chapter, I criticize various interpretations of the claim that metaphysics and science, are and/or ought to be “continuous.” I argue that there are deep commonalities between metaphysics and science which frustrate attempts to show that there is a fundamental distinction between them. In conclusion, I show that metaphysical naturalism is not only more rich and complex than what most of its sympathizers and detractors believe, but also that it is consistent with many theses, norms, and posits of traditional, non-naturalistic approaches in philosophy generally.

abstract: This thesis is concerned with the methodological role of intuitions in metaphysics. It is divided into two main parts. Part I argues that an academic field can only employ a method of gathering evidence if it has established some agreed-upon standards regarding how to evaluate uses of this method. Existing meta-philosophical disputes take the nature of intuitions to be their starting point. This is a mistake. My concern is not the epistemic status of intuitions, but rather how metaphysicians appeal to intuitions as a form of evidence. In order for intuitions to play a viable role in research they must be subject to certain constraints, regardless of whether they allow individual researchers to know that their theories are true. Metaphysicians are not permitted to use intuitions as arbitrarily having different evidential status in different circumstances, nor should they continue to use intuitions as evidence in certain disputes when there is disagreement amongst disputants about whether intuitions should have this evidential status. Part II is dedicated to showing that metaphysicians currently use intuitions in precisely the sort of inconsistent manner that was shown to be impermissible in Part I. I first consider several competing theories of how intuitions function as evidence and argue that they all fail. As they are currently used in metaphysics, intuitions are analogous to instruments in the sciences in that they are taken to be a substantial non-inferential source of evidence for theories. I then analyze several major metaphysical disputes and show that the source of controversy in these disputes boils down to inconsistencies in how the different parties treat intuitions as evidence. I conclude that metaphysicians must abandon appeals to intuition as evidence--at least until the field can agree upon some general standards that can resolve these inconsistencies. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Philosophy 2014

This dissertation takes up the question of the social function of philosophy. Popular accounts of the nature and value of philosophy reinforce long-standing perceptions that philosophy is useless or irrelevant to pressing societal problems. Yet, the increasingly neoliberal political-economic environment of higher education places a premium on mechanisms that link public funding for research to demonstrations of return on investment in the form of benefitting broader society. This institutional situation presents a philosophical problem warranting professional attention. This project offers a diagnosis of the problem and develops a way forward from it. Drawing from Foucauldian archaeological methods, my analysis focuses on the interplay of institutional structures and intellectual practices. Since the early 20th century, departments of philosophy on college and university campuses have been the center of gravity for professional philosophy in the US. Establishing this institutional ‘home' for philosophers drove the adoption of disciplinary practices, norms, and standards for inquiry. But the metaphilosophical assumptions underpinning disciplinarity have become problematic, I argue: they are poor guides for navigating the situation of higher education in the 21st century. Several movements within the profession of philosophy during the 1960s and 70s sought to reverse philosophers' general retreat from public affairs. Applied philosophy, environmental philosophy, and bioethics each offer a case study in attempts to address the problem of societal relevance. However, surveys of the journal literature in each field uncovered few reflections on whether or not individual projects, or the field as a whole, had any impact on the societal problems to which those philosophers turned their attention. This suggests a need for further thinking about implementation – how to institutionalize alternative practices of philosophy that do demonstrate societal relevance. By way of conclusion, I offer some of the necessary groundwork toward a philosophy of implementation, in the form of discussing significant questions and challenges confronting philosophers who aim for societal relevance both in principle and in practice.

Traditional philosophy has been under attack from several quarters in recent years. The traditional philosopher views philosophy as an armchair discipline relying, for the most part, on reason and reflection. Some philosophers doubt the legitimacy of this type of inquiry. Their arguments usually occur along two dimensions. Some argue that the primary data source for the armchair philosopher--intuition--does not provide evidence for philosophical theories. Others argue that conceptual analysis, which is the preferred method of inquiry for armchair philosophers, can't yield the results the philosopher is looking for, since concepts like 'knowledge' or 'free-will' vary from culture to culture or even between persons within a culture. Finally, some philosophers argue that we should abandon the armchair program because philosophy should be an empirical enterprise continuous with the sciences. I argue that attempts to undermine intuition fail and that one can justify the evidential status of intuition in a non-question begging way. I then argue that attacks on the belief in shared concepts do not succeed because they often conflate the nature of scientific objects with those of interest to the philosopher. However, if concepts do vary from culture to culture, I show that the philosopher need not abandon the armchair. She can still do conceptual analysis but it will be only the entry point into the philosophical dialogue. I apply this approach to epistemology arguing that the central epistemic questions ought to be the existential and the normative. This approach helps to vindicate epistemic internalism.

Anti-theorists claim that moral theories do not deliver all the goods we want and that consequently such theorizing is not a philosophically worthy pursuit. We suffer from certain misconceptions about the point and purpose of such theorizing and the theories it produces. In this essay, I treat moral theorizing as a genuinely theoretical enterprise that produces abstract knowledge about the general structure of morality.Moral theories should be understood as tools--intellectual and practical tools with importantly different uses. Just as with hand tools where it is useful to have hammers for one sort of job and screwdrivers for another, it can be rational to accept multiple moral theories at the same time. The idea here is that all good theories illuminate some truths about morality, but are also misleading at times. A theory that is good at solving one moral problem may be bad at solving another; a theory that is illuminating in one place may be distorting in another.Chapter one outlines the differences between moral theory, metaethics, moral metatheory, and morality itself. It argues that disagreement about moral theory need not reflect moral disagreement, and vice versa. Chapter two argues that even if moral theory turned out to be practically useless, it would still accomplish certain theoretical tasks. Chapters three and four explain how and why one might adopt different incompatible moral theories at the same time. Chapter five defends moral principles from various particularists and shows how the imperfections of moral principles mirror the imperfections of laws in other fields. Chapter six explains why philosophical inquiry is worthwhile despite the overwhelming disagreement displayed by philosophers. Chapter seven shows that moral intuitions serve as a check on philosophical methodology just as much as methodology helps us verify our intuitions. It explains why a certain sort of psychology-based argument against deontological intuitions will not work. Finally, chapter eight explores the various ways in which moral theory is and is not practical. It concludes that the practical usefulness of theory is a matter of empirical contingency that philosophers have done little to investigate.

This work challenges the assumption that Wittgenstein’s comments about the word “philosophy” are always either normative or descriptive. In the introduction, I demonstrate that some apparent inconsistencies of Wittgenstein’s programmatic remarks can only be resolved if we reject this distinction. Although the distinction is not central to any major interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work, rejecting it will have significant implications regarding his relation to the history of philosophy. My central task is to demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s view of the history of philosophy does not imply a strict distinction between the historical concept of philosophy and Wittgenstein’s method. The core of my argument revolves around the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. In this text, Wittgenstein compares magic with metaphysics and then proceeds to attack Frazer’s exceedingly critical analysis of primitive religions. I argue that Wittgenstein’s later use of the word “metaphysic” indicates that his criticism of past philosophers is not radical enough to justify a strict distinction between his philosophical program and the history of philosophy. In order to confirm the conclusions I have drawn from Wittgenstein’s use of the word “metaphysics,” I studied two conversations Wittgenstein had about Heidegger. I read Wittgenstein’s comments about Heidegger as a sign of the blurring distinction between his own program and more traditional conceptions of philosophy.

This dissertation is a set of three essays connected by the common theme of our epistemic fragility: the way in which our knowledge – of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths themselves – is hostage to forces outside our control. The first essay, “Are We Luminous?”, is a recasting and defence of Timothy Williamson’s argument that there are no non-trivial conditions such that we are in a position to know we are in them whenever we are in them. Crucial to seeing why Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument succeeds, pace various critics, is recognising that the issue is largely an empirical one. It is in part because of the kind of creatures we are – specifically, creatures with coarse-grained doxastic dispositions – that nothing of interest, for us, is luminous. In the second essay, “What’s in a Norm?”, I argue that such an Anti-Cartesian view in turn demands that epistemologists and ethicists accept the ubiquity of normative luck, the phenomenon whereby agents fail to do what they ought because of non-culpable ignorance. Those who find such a view intolerable – many epistemic internalists and ethical subjectivists – have the option of cleaving to the Cartesian orthodoxy by endorsing an anti-realist metanormativity. The third essay, “The Archimedean Urge”, is a critical discussion of genealogical scepticism about philosophical judgment, including evolutionary debunking arguments and experimentally-motivated attacks. Although such genealogical scepticism often purports to stand outside philosophy – in the neutral terrains of science or common sense – it tacitly relies on various first-order epistemic judgments. The upshot is two-fold. First, genealogical scepticism risks self-defeat, impugning commitment to its own premises. Second, philosophers have at their disposal epistemological resources to fend off genealogical scepticism: namely, an epistemology that takes seriously the role that luck plays in the acquisition of philosophical knowledge.