[was: Re: Have You Read All These Books?]
I wrote: >> Okay, we agree in practice. _In practice_, AP's [analytical
philosophy's] method involves discouragement of scholarship as Justin
defines it here. <<
Justin responds: >Of course we could drop the "method involves" and have a
sentence that means almost the same thing, which undermines the point of
talking about "method." However, there is no point in raking this over again.<
Perhaps "AP" can be _defined_ as the rejection of discussions of "method"
(i.e., how logical analysis and empirical study should be combined to
answer moral, empirical, and other questions)? So issues like the debate
between Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and others who study the philosophy of
science are deemed to be irrelevant (or even silly) by the practitioners of
AP?
I asked:>>The _official_ or desired method of AP is logic? then what
distinguished it from Aristotle? of from any other school of philosophy
(except maybe post modernism)? haven't almost all philosophers since
Aristotle thought that formal logic was extremely revealing if not
absolutely necessary to clear thinking? Does AP add anything to logic that
previous philosophers didn't know about?<<
Justin responds: >Analytical philosophy is the heir of logical positivism,
which gave modern logical, as developed by Frege, Russell and Whitehead, et
al. an absolutely central place in doin philosophy.
>Modern mathematical logic is a quantum jump over the Aristotlean logic
that preceded it in power and flexibility; there's no comparison. ... So,
yes, I think you can say that analytical philosophy has advanced the study
of logic a bit--more than anyone had since Aristotle, truth be told.
>Russell's analutical philosophy, the early Wittgenstein, and logical
positivism (the Vienna Circle) made the use of this logic basic to the
doing of philosophy; problems were formulated in terms of it, and those
that couldn't be were dismissed. The only previous philosophical movement
that made logic so central was scholasticism, where philosophers were
likewise expected to be
fluent in formalism and able to think that way as part of professional
competence. Of course the logic was much more primitive. Analytical
philosophy has discarded most of the tents of logical positivism--the
verification principle, etc.--but it has retained the emphasis on logic.
>At Michigan grad school in philosophy, you had to pass the math logic
course with a high grade, and it also fulfilled the language requirement,
on the grounds taht it was a "formal language." ...<
Okay, so the AP types gave us greater understanding of formal logic. This
is all for the good, though I can imagine that logic, like mathematics, can
easily be fetishized in the face of an empirical world that often seems
illogical or at least too heterogeneous and mixed to be fit into logical
categories. Then, how is AP distinguished from other schools of philosophy
that accept the validity and importance of logic? For example, Bertell
Ollman tries to be as logical as possible. The way the term "analytical
philosophy" is used, at least as I've encountered it, it would exclude
him. Would it also exclude my brother the philosophy professor, who's into
"natural law"? BTW, he's also very logical, given his premises.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
