ON THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY III

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                          III

 

PHILOSOPHY AS CONJECTURAL ANTICIPATION OF SCIENCE

                                        Where there is philosophy, there will be Science.

                                        Robert Nozick

 

                                               

Now I would like to initiate our descriptivist inquiry into the criteria used to identify philosophical discourse and thought. My proposal is that, even if we cannot establish a proper object unique to philosophical investigation, nor anything methodologically distinctive that belongs exclusively to it, we may nonetheless discern something peculiar to philosophy – provided we direct our attention to the constitutive elements of its form.

 

1. THE INEVITABLY CONJECTURAL NATURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

Even if the descriptivist metaphilosopher does not discern a distinctive feature of philosophy in the material aspects of his inquiry, he may nonetheless always identify a salient formal trait common to all philosophical investigation, namely, its conjectural character: Philosophy is, in essence, a conjectural or speculative endeavour, in the sense that philosophers are unable to reach sufficient consensus on their ideas, doctrines, and even their most fundamental values and conceptions.

   There is no philosophy whose results can be taken as definitive and beyond dispute, as in truly scientific domains, such as, say, molecular biology. As we can see from Russell’s scientifically directed realist comments about the uncertain nature of philosophy, collected by Alan Wood:

 

Science is what we know; philosophy is what we don’t know.

Science is what we can prove to be true; philosophy is what we cannot prove to be false.

Philosophy is something intermediary between theology and science.

Nine-tenths of philosophy is mystification; the only part entirely defined is the logic, and as it is logic, it is not philosophy. [1]

 

The reason for the inevitably conjectural character of philosophy is not hard to see. To reach a consensual agreement on the results of our inquiries, we need at least to share some basic background assumptions and general presuppositions. But philosophy lacks even a minimal set of such shared presuppositions at almost every step of its investigations. What is particularly important here is the absence of foundational assumptions that could generate consensus about what we might call:

 

(A)    Justifying evidence. These general assumptions enable the formulation of common questions and the determination of what counts as relevant data. Philosophers, however, rarely agree on which data are supposed to ground their arguments, nor on the degree of relevance of those data. They don’t even agree on which questions are worth asking: what some regard as crucial, others dismiss as irrelevant or meaningless.

(B)    Justifying procedures. These require sufficient prior agreement on criteria and methods for evaluating truth and value, thereby enabling shared solutions. But here again, what counts as a convincing argument for some may strike others as implausible or irrelevant.

 

 

Without the sharing of assumptions of types (A) and (B), which philosophy does not possess, while the particular sciences do, it seems impossible to expect anything like agreement on results.

   To illustrate, let us return to Plato’s doctrine of the Forms. This theory was proposed as a solution to what might be called the problem of generality. Moreover, it was built on the presupposition that something must be immutable to count as a legitimate object of knowledge. Since Heraclitus had already made clear that the sensible world is in constant flux, such a world could not be the proper object of knowledge. So the proper object of knowledge could only be what Plato called Forms (εἶδη) or Ideas (ἰδέαι): eternal, unchanging entities existing outside time and space, in a purely intelligible realm. The consequence is straightforward: it becomes possible, for example, to predicate justice of a wide variety of visible things, insofar as they exemplify the abstract Form of the justice: the Justice-in-itself.

   However, the doctrine also entails serious difficulties. One of them is this: how can a single abstract idea be related to the many concrete individuals to which it applies? To deal with this problem, Plato appealed to the metaphors of participation (μέθεξις) and of copying (μίμησις). However, these metaphors seem to be unrecoverable. By the metaphor of participation, he was forced to claim that many things can participate in the same idea without thereby dividing it into parts—a claim that looks inconsistent. The metaphor of copying seems more promising until we notice that it is not intelligible how things could copy an abstract idea belonging to the purely intelligible world into the visible, sensible world.

   The very notion of the Platonic idea faces difficulties. Critics of the doctrine may be tempted to conclude that the Platonic concept of idea is intrinsically incoherent, precisely because it depends on metaphors that cannot be cashed out. Are these objections justified? To me, it seems they are. Today, there are not many philosophers who defend Platonism, though some do. – Frege, in his essay “The Thought” (Der Gedanke), offered the most refined defense of Platonism by an analytic philosopher. Beyond that, we lack any alternative that commands universal acceptance. All we can say is, at present, that Platonism strikes many as an implausible option.

   The situation of doubt is not itself intolerable, but it becomes desperate once we demand that the historical period in which the doctrine was formulated be part of the equation. In Plato’s time, there was simply no way to conclude that his doctrine was implausible. It is therefore understandable that Aristotle found himself entangled in webs of difficulty when he tried, in his Metaphysics, to refute the existence of universals conceived as separate from substance.[2]

   The identification of the historical period and the subsequent context in which a philosophical idea emerges is fundamental to our systematic perspective. To better see this point, consider the case of Empedocles, regarded by Darwin as a precursor of his theory of natural evolution. Empedocles maintained that living beings arose through the random combination of body parts; many of these assemblages were monstrous and unfit for survival, but those that were well adapted endured. His view was right, but was Empedocles in his time already doing science? Certainly not, for in his time such notions could only be stated as speculative hypotheses, impossible to evaluate scientifically. Had he advanced these claims in Darwin’s era, they would have been treated as scientific hypotheses, since empirical data would have made their evaluation possible. This means that we must always attend to the historical context in which a philosophical conjecture is proposed, in order to determine whether it is genuinely philosophical.

   Uncertainty is, in fact, to be expected, since philosophy is concerned with building theories on shaky foundations. This is a fallibilist conclusion, somewhat depressing, which many traditional philosophers tried to deny, but which contemporary philosophers have long since learned to accept as inevitable. And there are no exceptions. Even the therapeutic philosophy attempted by the later Wittgenstein, which was supposed to be purely descriptive, quickly revealed itself incapable of producing consensus: what he saw as a remedy, others saw as a placebo, or even as a poison.

   This impossibility of consensus is also the most striking point of contrast between philosophy and science. For unlike philosophy, in everything we call ‘science’—whether empirical or formal—there is always a sufficient degree of prior agreement about…

 

(A) Justifying evidence, that is, general presuppositions which make possible the formulation of common questions and the selection of relevant data (sensitive data/axioms); and

(B) Justifying procedures, that is, a sufficient prior agreement concerning the criteria and methods for evaluating truth or the intended value, thereby enabling the achievement of shared solutions (verifications/proofs).

 

 

These prior agreements make subsequent consensus on results possible, whether through verification or refutation in the empirical sciences, or through the demonstration of theorems in the formal sciences. It is precisely because scientists have been able to establish such common grounds that, unlike philosophers, they also can reach agreement on the outcomes of their inquiries and sustain the expectation of progressive development.

   Philosophy, by contrast, is conjectural by its very nature. Two formal features follow from this: it is typically argumentative, and it is inevitably aporetic in character, with few and dubious exceptions. Philosophers are always postulating or suggesting uncertain principles, and attempting to validate them by tracing their implications. Since these principles are themselves conjectural, the process requires constant critical comparison of consequences and ongoing evaluation of the arguments used to support them. The task has no natural end. It is this speculative character that grounds the distinctively argumentative, dialogical, and aporetic practice of philosophy.

   Can philosophy be defined solely by its conjectural or speculative character? Not without qualification, since not all conjectures are philosophical. We can, for example, formulate hypotheses about the Earth’s climate conditions over the next hundred years. But such hypotheses do not constitute philosophical inquiry. They lack a theoretical point: they amount to plausible scientific projections of empirical events subject to variation. In mathematics, Goldbach’s conjecture – that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes – also does not count as philosophical. The reason seems to be that, like many other mathematical conjectures, it is at least believed to be provable. In philosophy, by contrast, we do not even know whether our conjectures can be demonstrated as true; they may well fall into the category of so‑called pseudoproblems.

Moreover, conjectural projection, even when theoretical, does not, by itself, sustain philosophy. Take Noam Chomsky’s hypothesis of an innate universal grammar: although it has inspired extensive research, it resists straightforward demonstration, yet it remains scientific rather than philosophical. This is due not only to its specificity but also to the fact that evaluation paths could be identified and continue to be pursued. Similarly, speculative frameworks in contemporary physics, such as string theory, are in principle testable but remain far from practical verification. These theories retain, one might say, a speculative or “philosophical” trace, yet they are regarded as scientific because physicists do not consider them so speculative as to make it absurd to imagine a way of submitting them to the tribunal of experience.

   The distinction between scientific speculation and philosophical speculation rests, at least in part, on the extent to which consensual demonstration is possible. Yet this difference, it is worth noting, need not be sharply defined.

   In conclusion, it seems we can classify as philosophical all investigative efforts that, in their own time, are regarded as essentially conjectural, that is, views that, at the moment of their formulation, lack any conceivable means of evaluation with respect to their outcomes. This may be taken as the most general criterion for distinguishing what belongs to philosophy and what does not. Yet, it remains a rather crude and unilluminating criterion when it comes to a characterization of the actual nature of philosophy in its central and historically most significant domains.

 

2. THE IDEA OF PHILOSOPHY AS A PROTO-SCIENCE  

 

“Why is philosophy a conjectural form of investigation?” A possible answer to this question could be that the conjectural or speculative character of philosophy derives, at least in many cases, from its proto-scientific nature. That is, philosophy is conjectural because it is an enterprise that anticipates the scientific endeavor. From this perspective, the persistent relevance of many philosophical formulations would lie in the scientific truths that, in some way, are prefigured within them.

   A considerable amount of philosophy has historically anticipated science. This is not a hypothetical claim but a statement of fact, accompanied by changes in the vocabulary. As it is well known, among the Greeks, when all the basic empirical sciences were still in the process of formation, the term ‘philosophia’ (φιλοσοφία) was applied indiscriminately to the entire domain of human inquiry. Only much later, gradually, as a result of the emergence of empirical sciences like physics and chemistry, between the 17th and 19 centuries, occurred the gradual replacement of the word ‘science’ for ‘natural philosophy’. William Whewell’s coinage of ‘scientist’ in 1833 signaled the consolidation of the modern distinction. With the emergence of basic sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, the application of the term ‘philosophy’ gradually became more restricted, though retaining a resilient central core.

   By yielding portions of its domain to science, the philosophical tradition has revealed itself as the cradle – or better, as Kenny suggested, the womb – from which the basic sciences were born,[3] or again, as their “place-holder”. This recognition of philosophy’s role as the anticipation of science was memorably captured in a well-known metaphor by J. L. Austin:

 

Philosophy is the original sun—central, seminal, and tumultuous—which, from time to time, sheds a portion of itself that hardens into science: a cold, well-regulated planet, advancing steadily toward some distant final state. This happened long ago with the birth of mathematics, and again with the birth of physics. Only in the last century have we witnessed the same process once more, slow and at first almost imperceptible, in the emergence of the science of mathematical logic, born from the joint labors of philosophers and mathematicians.[4]

 

Austin demonstrated this thesis in practice by devoting the last ten years of his life to the development of a kind of grammar of communicative speaking – namely, the theory of speech acts – which today is studied more extensively in courses on linguistics than in those on philosophy.[5]

   Indeed, insofar as philosophy is conceived as a speculative inquiry elaborated upon a body of thought that may, at least potentially, find its place within science, we gain a deeper reason for understanding its conjectural, argumentative, and aporetic aspects. If philosophy is that which can be undertaken prior to the possibility of any scientific investigation, it becomes more intelligible that the most diverse hypotheses may be formulated, that multiple lines of reasoning may be developed in their justification, and that the dispute over the correct hypothesis and the most persuasive argument may persist indefinitely.

   As even Wittgenstein unexpectedly observed: “One may also call ‘philosophy’ that which is possible before all discoveries and inventions.”[6]   This state of affairs comes to an end only when the path of scientific inquiry is definitively established, that is, when scholars reach a sufficient degree of consensus regarding the fundamental presuppositions that sustain a given field of research. Such a consensus provides a clear delimitation of what counts as relevant data, which questions are admissible, and which procedures are valid for assessing their answers. Once this prior agreement is broad enough to make conceivable the production of consensual results, scholars cease to describe their object of investigation as “philosophical” and simply redefine it as the object of science. This gives rise to the popular saying that the tragedy of the philosopher is that whenever he arrives at a definitive truth, he loses it to the scientist.

 

3. ORIGINS AND DIVISIONS OF SCIENCE

Before discussing in detail the possibilities of deriving science from philosophy, it is advisable to say something about the classification and emergence of the most fundamental sciences.

   The sciences are traditionally divided into two kinds: formal and empirical. These two kinds have always maintained, to some extent, a relation of interdependence throughout their development. The fundamental formal sciences are logic and mathematics, whose beginnings reach back to antiquity. Elementary arithmetic and geometry separated themselves from philosophy already among the Greeks, when their respective objects – the number, in the case of arithmetic, and the point and geometric forms, in the case of geometry—came to be considered independently of the practical problems they were originally meant to resolve. A limited form of logic also appeared early in the Aristotelian syllogistic.

   We could, without doubt, speak of a protological and a protomathematical philosophy. Parmenides’ poem, for instance, offers an implicit metaphysical formulation of the logical laws of identity, non-contradiction, and even the excluded middle, in asserting that “being is and non-being cannot be.” Plato, in turn, already possessed a rudimentary theory of predication. The Pythagorean philosophers, impressed by the achievements of abstract mathematics, believed that numbers were the arché (ἀρχή), the causal principle sustaining all of reality, thereby conflating, in their own way, the formal with the empirical. By trying to explain our lifeworld through mathematics, they exemplified reductionism in antiquity. Yet the true question, still philosophical today, concerning the ontological nature of numbers remained, at that time, shrouded in obscurity.

   Resuming the discussion on the empirical sciences, I shall adopt here a revised and updated version of Auguste Comte’s classification of what can be called the basic empirical sciences. This classification remains quite reasonable when properly interpreted. Moreover, it is capable of providing us with a framework for understanding the order in which these sciences emerged as the historically demonstrated trunk of the tree of knowledge, whose branches, in turn, become exceedingly diverse.

The classificatory principle devised by Comte establishes that the basic sciences are organized according to a dual order:

 

(a) From the greatest to the least generality in the scope of the phenomena investigated.

(b) From the least to the greatest complexity of these phenomena, insofar as the exactness of a science is inversely proportional to the complexity of the objects it studies.

 

By modifying and updating Comte’s original classification, we can distinguish five basic empirical sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology.[7]  The following scheme summarizes this classification:

 

   PARTICULARITY                                                  COMPLEXITY

 

                                5. sociology             human

                                4. psychology          sciences

        (a)                                                                                     (b)

                                3. biology                 ciências

                                2. chemistry              naturais

                                1. physics

                     (formal sciences: logic and mathematics)

 

   GENERALITY                                                         SIMPLICITY

 

 

From (1) to (5), we have what we can call the basic empirical sciences, organized in a hierarchy in which each presupposes the preceding one. Physics, which depends on the development of mathematics, occupies the foundation of this structure. It is rightly regarded as the fundamental empirical science, for its scope encompasses the entirety of empirical reality without exception: atoms, subatomic particles, and elementary forces, submited to its laws, are believed to permeate the entire universe. Its principles are also the simplest, which allows for the broadest range of applications. This does not mesan that a theory in physics cannot be complex, together with its applications. Still, it rests on principles or laws that must be sufficiently simple to apply to the whole universe, as much as we know. To illustrate this point, consider general relativity: it involves daunting, complex mathematics, yet it relies on simple principles, such as the principle of equivalence, which states that gravitational force and acceleration are indistinguishable. Chemistry, in turn, has a more restricted scope, focused on phenomena arising from the combination of atomic elements. It is divided into two major areas: inorganic chemistry, concerned with non-carbon-based compounds, and organic chemistry, consisting of carbon-based compounds that can be much more complex. The result is that chemistry applies to planets and stars, whereas organic chemistry applies only to the biochemistry of living beings, organic materials such as crude oil, and synthetic materials such as plastics. With an even narrower scope, biology is devoted to the study of living beings, vegetals or animals, constituted by organic material. Psychology is limited to a small subset of living beings: those that exhibit mental phenomena from which consciousness emerges. Finally, sociology has the most restricted scope, focusing exclusively on the study of human societies in both their static and dynamic forms.

   An increase in the complexity of the principles involved compensates for the progressive loss of generality in the phenomena investigated. This occurs because more complex phenomena can only emerge in more specific and delimited contexts, such as those of the higher basic sciences. Restricting ourselves to natural sciences, chemistry is more complex than physics; organic chemistry is more complex than chemistry; life is a much more complex phenomenon. Turning to the human and social sciences, we see phenomena that seem even more complex. Consider, for example, the vast number of variables that would need to be computed to predict the fate of a human being or future socio-political events, and compare it with the mathematics necessary to predict a lunar eclipse.

   It must be emphasized that the human and social sciences distinguish themselves from the natural sciences by incorporating an interpretative dimension referred to in psychology as empathy and in sociology as comprehension (Verstehen, in Max Weber’s formulation), or as the sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills). In other words, to apprehend psychological and social phenomena, one must turn to the mind itself as a mirror of what is to be understood, placing oneself in the mind of others, or of others in groups of others, in order to discern how they feel or respond in given situations. Admittedly, the addition of this interpretive element renders the attainment of consensus in these sciences more difficult. Yet this does not render such results impossible, for interpretation is not, at least in principle, incapable of scientific clarification.

   The relations between generality and complexity also shed light on the order of our cognitive apprehension of the basic sciences, as well as on the very sequence of their historical development. Indeed, to learn physics, it is, in principle, unnecessary to possess any prior knowledge of chemistry. Chemistry, however, presupposes sufficient understanding of its physical foundations. Likewise, to grasp the phenomena of life more fully, one must turn to organic chemistry in the form of biochemistry, for it is through this discipline that the pillars of genetics and molecular biology are established. The study of psychology, in turn, requires sufficient knowledge of biology. Finally, the comprehension of sociology demands some familiarity with psychology, including its interpretative dimension, and thus tends, to a certain extent, to presuppose the preceding sciences.

   These interdependencies help us to understand why the development of the more narrowly scoped and complex sciences generally depends upon the progress of the more general and simpler ones. Such dependence is not confined to theoretical foundations but also encompasses the technological and instrumental advances achieved by the more general sciences. How, for instance, could biology have advanced without the invention of the microscope, whose construction rests upon the principles of optics, themselves directly derived from physics? Thus, the progress of the higher basic sciences is conditioned not only by the accumulated knowledge of the earlier sciences but also by their practical applications, which enable new techniques of investigation and comprehension.

   These considerations allow us to justify the order in which the basic sciences came into being. The first to emerge was physics during the Renaissance. Although rudimentary elements of this science were already present in Antiquity (for instance, in Archimedes’ discovery of specific density), it was only after Galileo that experimental physics consolidated itself as a unified body of scientific ideas. Chemistry, in turn, arose as a distinct science only between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Psychology gradually evolved into scientific experimental psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, though its legitimacy as a science as a whole remains debated, particularly from the standpoint of “depth psychology,” as advanced by Freudian psychoanalysis. Sociology, meanwhile, was structured as an independent complex theoretical body with scientific aspirations only through the contributions of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. Both psychology and sociology became independent of philosophy only partially, in a gradual, staged, and often conflict-ridden process.[8]

   These dependencies help to explain why the process of establishing psychology and sociology as sciences has been far slower, more laborious, and more incremental. We observe a leap, a genuine turning point that could be called an epistemic turning point, between science and what preceded its emergence,[9] with the birth of physics as a body of scientific knowledge through Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century; with the birth of chemistry through Lavoisier, Cavendish, and others at the end of the eighteenth century; and even with the much more gradual organization of biology as a scientific body of knowledge throughout the nineteenth century, by figures such as Louis Pasteur, Claude Bernard, Gregor Mendel, and Charles Darwin.

   These ruptures occurred when, in addition to the accumulation of knowledge, appropriate methods of investigation were discovered – methods capable of generating consensus regarding the predictive and explanatory power of theories coalesced into a unified body. Yet the more complex and dependent domains of inquiry become, the lower the likelihood of abrupt leaps or ruptures. This is precisely what we encounter in the more complex fields of psychology and the social sciences, where no single historical moment of epistemic rupture can be clearly identified.    

    Thus, the more gradual constitution of the human sciences is closely related to the hierarchy of the sciences. It involves a far greater complexity and diversity of phenomena to be investigated, with intervening variables that tend to multiply exponentially. In addition, evaluative procedures in these fields require much broader foundational assumptions, often developed through the basic sciences and their applications.

   Nevertheless, the principal reason for the difficulty in rendering the human sciences fully scientific lies in their irreducibly interpretative element (Verstehen, empathy, social imagination), which depends upon constant reflexive examination and plays a central role in psychology and the social sciences. This interpretive dimension encompasses aspects not accessible to direct interpersonal observation and therefore cannot be treated as readily in an objective manner. Yet it should not be regarded, as behaviorists such as J. B. Watson in psychology and social positivists such as Émile Durkheim attempted, as hopelessly subjective. For, as John Searle has noted, what is ontologically subjective need not, by that very fact, also be epistemically subjective.[10]

   In summary, the full development of the human sciences depends both upon the maturation of the basic sciences and upon the advancement of the technical applications made possible by them. We may ask, for instance, to what extent psychology might present itself as more genuinely scientific in the future, insofar as it becomes integrated into more fully developed neuroscientific foundations. Beyond this, their progress also relies on an expansion of the epistemic possibilities inherent in the empathetic comprehension of human beings, both at the individual and social levels.

   There is a reason why the sciences considered within the scheme I derive from Comte deserve to be called “basic.” The other empirical sciences are, in general, specialized subdivisions of these fundamental sciences, such as linguistics and economics, which fall within the domain of the social sciences, or else result from the combination of their principles, applied locally to specific regions or objects. Examples of this second type include History, which draws upon psychology and sociology, among others, to understand the temporal transformations of human societies; ethnology, which applies psychological and sociological concepts to the study of culturally distinct groups; geology, which employs the foundations of physics and chemistry to investigate the structure and dynamics of the Earth; and Neurophysiology, which relies upon biochemistry and biophysics to explore cerebral functioning.

   There are also “open” sciences, whose evolution depends upon future events, such as history and economics. Although political economy has produced schools of thought that have made significant contributions since Adam Smith’s founding, it remains marked by uncertainty, given the complexity and constant transformation of its object of study. Other sciences stand out for their intrinsic complexity, such as neuroscience, which investigates the brain from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The number of possible subdivisions and local combinations appears virtually unlimited. Yet our aim here is not to propose an exhaustive or precise classification of the sciences, but rather to classify the basic sciences to provide a minimal conceptual framework for investigating the relations between philosophy and science.

   It is important to emphasize that the emergence of the basic sciences has consistently displaced purely philosophical speculation within the domains to which they pertain. The consolidation of physics as an experimental science, for instance, brought an end to the reign of Aristotelian speculative physics – at least insofar as it did not overlap with metaphysics, which to this day has not been superseded by any science. A similar fate befell the doctrine of the four elements, first proposed by Empedocles in the fifth century BCE and later adopted by Aristotle. This doctrine prevailed in Western thought for more than two millennia, only to be seriously challenged in the seventeenth century by Robert Boyle. The same occurred with vitalism, the doctrine that vital phenomena were governed by immaterial impulses distinct from physical forces, a view ultimately undermined by the development of molecular biology. It should be noted, however, that even in the twentieth century a philosophical reformulation of vitalism was defended by Henri Bergson in his theory of the élan vital.

   In this and the following chapters, I will adopt Comte's modified classification of the basic sciences, as I consider it, broadly speaking, to be the true trunk of the family tree of the sciences. What I aim to do here is establish a bare foundation that will help us understand the relationship between philosophy and science.

4. SOME EXAMPLES OF PROTOSCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL INSIGHTS

In this section, I shall examine several instances in which philosophical ideas anticipated concepts later developed within the sciences – specifically in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology.

   These examples may prove misleading, as we shall see, insofar as they pertain only to anticipations within the central trunk of well‑established basic sciences. They do not extend to the derivative sciences, which are less familiar or even still undiscovered, and which may differ considerably. This limitation can foster the false impression that our present philosophical inquiries ought to relate to the sciences of the future in the same way that philosophical insights from a more or less remote past have been related to our empirical basic sciences. Such an assumption may well underlie the persistence of a stubborn positivist scientism, still prevalent today, which tends to reduce philosophy of science to its relation with the most firmly established sciences, such as physics, thereby obstructing the very development of science itself. (For this tendency, Comte himself employed terms such as “usurpation,” “hypertrophy,” and “annexation.”) If we remain cautious enough in considering this point, however, the examples that follow will be instructive.

   My initial examples concern logic and mathematics. As noted in the preceding chapter, Parmenides, through his doctrine that “being necessarily is, whereas non‑being cannot be,”[11] may be seen as anticipating the three so‑called “laws of thought,” namely: (i) the principle of identity, according to which “being is,” formally expressed as “A = A” or “A → A,” already identified by Plato; (ii) the principle of non‑contradiction, which in Aristotle’s formulation asserts that “it is impossible that the same thing should at the same time both belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect,”[12] formally represented as “¬(A ∧ ¬A)”; and (iii) the principle of the excluded middle, according to which “if something belongs to a given subject, it cannot at the same time and in the same respect fail to belong to it,” formally expressed as “A ∨ ¬A.”  

   Let us now consider an example of anticipation within mathematics. It may be found in Aristotle’s response to Zeno’s celebrated paradox of motion, according to which Achilles would be unable to overtake a tortoise in a race if the latter were granted a head start. For whenever Achilles reached the point where the tortoise had been, the animal would already have advanced somewhat further.

   Aristotle replied by observing that the time required for Achilles to traverse each spatial interval is proportional to the size of that interval. Since these intervals become progressively smaller, the time needed to cross them likewise diminishes without bound in proportion. Thus, although there are infinitely many points to be reached, the total time required to reach them is finite, so that Achilles soon overtakes the tortoise.[13] This reasoning strikingly foreshadows the modern notion of the limit – though the concept itself would only be rigorously formalized many centuries later, with the development of infinitesimal calculus by Leibniz and Newton.

   Considering empirical examples, we encounter the notion advanced by Anaximander (647–610 BCE), according to which the Earth is not supported by anything, but remains suspended because it is equally distant from all things, thus making it impossible for it to move simultaneously in opposite directions.[14]

   Karl Popper argued that this was one of the boldest ideas in the entire history of human thought, for it paved the way for the theories of Aristarchus, Copernicus, and others. To conceive of the Earth as freely situated in the midst of space, and to assert that “it remains motionless because of equidistance and equilibrium,” is, in some measure, to anticipate the idea of immaterial and invisible gravitational forces that would be formally articulated by Isaac Newton many centuries later.[15]

   Although anticipatory of physics, Anaximander’s hypothesis cannot properly be regarded as scientific, since at the time it was formulated, there existed no procedure for assessing truth capable of leading to consensus. By contrast, the ideas of Copernicus and Newton could be subjected to tests and validations, thereby attaining consensus with mathematical precision regarding their truth – a condition of scientificity that was already possible in their respective epochs.

   A well-known example of anticipation is the atomistic theory of Democritus and Leucippus (5th century BCE), according to which visible matter is composed of invisible, physically indivisible atoms that possess innumerable distinct forms. This theory constitutes a speculative anticipation of what we might call the conceptual framework of an atomic theory of matter, though not of its specific content. Similarly, the theory of the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) first proposed by Empedocles, anticipated, though in a highly illusory way in terms of conceptual structure, Mendeleev’s periodic table with its ordering of the fundamental chemical elements.

    In the field of cosmology, the Presocratics offered anticipations of both the contemporary Big Bang theory and the hypothesis of a pulsating universe. The anticipation of the Big Bang theory, according to Anthony Kenny, was suggested by Anaxagoras. I shall be content here to present a quote of Kenny’s exposition:

 

All things were together, infinite in number, infinite in smallness; for the small was also infinite. Since all things were together, none was recognizable because of its smallness. (…) That primeval little stone began to spin, casting out the surrounding ether and air, thus forming the stars and the sun and the moon… But the separation was never complete, for even today in each thing there remains a portion of everything else. (…) The expansion of the universe continues to this day and will continue into the future. Perhaps it has generated other worlds beyond our own, with animals, people, cities, and products of the earth, just as happens with us, and also with sun and moon, just as in our case.[16]

 

Anaxagoras (c. 450 BCE) was not only the first to suggest a theory resembling the Big Bang, but also the first to propose the existence of other planets in the universe, inhabited by civilizations as advanced as our own.

   As for the theory of the pulsating universe, it was anticipated by Empedocles (c. 450 BCE), who conceived the cosmos as governed by two alternating forces: Love (Φιλία) and Strife (Νεῖκος). When Love prevails, the universe merges into a unified whole; when Strife dominates, the universe fragments into multiplicity, in an eternal cycle of union and separation.

   Regarding the contemporary pulsating or oscillating universe, its possibility was mathematically formulated by Richard Tolman. According to this hypothesis, after the expansion caused by the Big Bang, gravity would eventually overcome the expansive force, leading the universe to contract in a collapse known as the Big Crunch. From that moment, the process would begin anew cyclically until, with the constant and inevitable increase of entropy, the universe would reach its final death.[17]

   Another example of anticipation of science was Anaximander's hypothesis, seemingly pointing toward biological evolution.[18] He asserted that life originated in water, that living creatures could be spontaneously generated from moisture, and that human beings evolved from lower species, since in their earliest years they would have perished had they been as defenseless at birth as they are today. It is true that Anaximander’s ideas (6th century BCE), when taken in a strict sense, were deeply mistaken, for he believed in spontaneous generation and that human beings were initially gestated within fish, emerging fully formed rather than developing gradually.

   Empedocles, however, went further in the right direction. He believed that living beings were born from the combination of the elements, specifically, two parts of water, two of earth, and four of fire. From this, parts of animals were formed. Certain monstrosities appeared, such as oxen with human heads and, conversely, human heads upon oxen, as well as androgynous creatures, fragile and sterile. Only the fittest survived, giving rise to present-day animals and human beings. Charles Darwin hailed Empedocles as the first person to foresee natural evolution.[19]

   One might object here that sentences such as “The earth is suspended in empty space” and “Man developed from lower forms of life,” which can be extracted from the writings of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, are today scientific truths. Were they, then, philosophical truths that later became scientific? In a certain sense, yes. The ideas expressed in those sentences have come to be regarded as scientific by us. Nevertheless, this does not imply that they were not philosophical for other men in other times, for they only become self-evident when tied to the contemporary context of their utterance – that is, at least after Copernicus and Darwin.

   Precisely because we are examining the ideas of thinkers from the past, it is essential to consider them within the context in which they emerged. In that setting, given the absence of evidential support, such ideas could only be addressed in a speculative manner. Thus, the predicate ‘…is philosophical’ acquires an appropriate meaning only when opposed to the historical context in which philosophical ideation was born. When we situate these statements within the works of the Pre-Socratic philosophers – at a time when there was virtually no evidential foundation – we are compelled to regard them as philosophical speculations. Otherwise, we would be obliged to treat them as scientific generalizations, which would be anachronistic.

   The final example pertains to psychology, a field of inquiry that has not yet fully consolidated as science. Here we refer to Plato’s doctrine of the tripartition of the soul or psyche (ψυχή). According to this doctrine, the soul is formed by three distinct parts:[20]

 

(1)  The first part is the most primitive, constituted by bodily appetites, desires, and needs.

(2)  The second part is the spirited element, formed by emotional impulses such as courage, anger, ambition, pride, friendship, honor, loyalty, and so forth.

(3)  The third part of the soul is constituted by reason, which functions as an inhibitory principle commanding the others.

 

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato compared reason to the charioteer of a winged chariot to which a pair of horses is harnessed: one, noble, representing the spirited element and striving to ascend toward the realm of Ideas; the other, ignoble, symbolizing the lower appetites and attempting to drag the chariot back to the earthly world, thereby imposing great difficulty upon its driver.[21]

   Now, Plato’s doctrine of the tripartition of the soul has, to some extent, been corroborated by neuroscience. According to the renowned neurophysiologist Paul McLean[22], author of the triune brain theory, the brain comprises three interrelated, evolutionarily derived “computers”: the reptilian brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex. The reptilian brain corresponds to the medulla oblongata and the basal ganglia. It is responsible for the organism’s instinctive dispositions, such as respiration, heartbeat, hunger, and sexual drive. The limbic system governs emotional memory, mood, and motivation. Finally, the neocortex, which in humans occupies approximately 78% of the encephalic mass, is responsible for rational thought, language, decision-making, and consciousness.

   Although the triune brain theory is now by many regarded as only a roughly acceptable oversimplification, a “didactic device” about the way the brain works, there are reasons to see this objection as a symptom of reductionist scientism[23]. Anyway, its resemblance to Plato’s conception of the soul, composed of desire (the reptilian system), emotion (the limbic system), and reason (the neocortex), is remarkable.

   From the perspective of psychology, Plato’s theory of the tripartition of the mind may also be regarded as a precursor to Sigmund Freud’s structural theory of the mind.[24]  According to the latter, the mind is likewise divided into three instances:

 

1) The Id (Es), entirely unconscious, represents instinctual impulses and basic drives.

2) The Superego (Über-Ich), generally unconscious, corresponds to the introjected paternal figure and functions as the moral instance, demanding the realization of ideals.

3) The Ego (Ich), largely unconscious, is directly connected to perception, conscious will, and motor control.

 

The dynamics among these instances, according to Freud, are governed by the Ego, which seeks to balance the demands of the Superego with the impulses of the Id.

   The theories of Plato and Freud exhibit only partial correspondences. The Freudian Id largely corresponds to the bodily appetites described by Plato, but it also encompasses volitional elements such as anger, which the philosopher attributed to the spirited part of the soul. The Superego, in turn, bears a certain resemblance to Plato’s inhibitory element, symbolized by the noble horse in the allegory of the winged chariot. The Ego appears to correspond to the Platonic rational principle, the charioteer charged with reconciling the opposing demands of the Id and the Superego. Freud (like Nietzsche) would regard Plato as an escapist who, unconsciously, downplayed the significance of the hedonistic dimension of the human psyche. As Freud declared in an interview, the life of the ordinary man is reduced to two great driving forces: “sex and money.” Isn’t here someting be missing? Freud considered Marx psychologically naïve, but his view of human nature was as somber as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

   When we confront these theories, we encounter a difficulty similar to that faced when comparing philosophical doctrines. Freudian psychoanalysis, though in many ways an unsurpassed work, exhibits its own shortcomings and does not fully satisfy the criteria of scientific inquiry, particularly if such inquiry requires consensus among specialists regarding its results. Indeed, its practitioners, however qualified, never achieved such agreement, which contributed to the fragmentation of psychoanalysis into various competing schools, each guided by its own “intellectual mentors.” Even so, whereas Plato’s proposal was based essentially on his personal experience and general observations of human behavior, Freud’s theory derived its conclusions from a systematic method of free association applied to numerous patients in a controlled medium. Moreover, it introduced a particularly significant theoretical element – the unconscious – which was investigated by him in a less metaphorical and far more detailed manner. Within this context, Freud’s structural theory of mind seeks to provide a more comprehensive understanding, and indeed appears to do so. Although uncertain and open to questioning, it offers a conceptual framework more suitable for evaluation, at least with respect to the categories of contemporary clinical psychology.

   Is it possible to identify, throughout this trajectory, a linearly clear evolution? Unfortunately, no. Not everything Plato wrote about the tripartition of the soul was assimilated by psychoanalysis, and even less so by the theories like that of the triune brain. Consider, for instance, the association Plato established between the three parts of the soul and the four cardinal virtues of Hellas: the rational part corresponds to wisdom; the volitional part, to courage; and the appetitive part, when subjected to the control of the will, to temperance. Finally, it is from the harmony among these three dimensions of the soul, integrated into a whole, that the virtue of justice emerges. None of this can be found in Freud.

   I wish to conclude this section by distinguishing between good and bad anticipations. Most of the examples considered may be seen as good anticipations: Anaximander’s ideas about the shape and location of the Earth, Empedocles’ idea of biological selection… these show, in an obviously very rudimentary way, the direction to be followed by science. And Plato’s theory of the tripartition of the soul anticipates roughly the structure of a supposedly scientific theory and a theory close to science. 

   Nevertheless, some philosophical endeavors may be regarded as “misguided anticipations”, insofar as they pointed toward erroneous paths. The theory of the four elements, proposed by Empedocles, stands as a clear example. It took more than two millennia for Robert Boyle, in the seventeenth century, to demonstrate its inconsistency. Another notorious case emerged in the eighteenth century with the phlogiston hypothesis, which posited the existence of a substance released by fire and responsible for combustion. This notion proved entirely mistaken and delayed the advancement of chemistry for nearly a century. The most emblematic instance of misguided anticipation, however, was Aristotle’s aprioristic physics.[25]  Accepted by the Church as dogma, it significantly hindered the development of experimental physics throughout the Middle Ages, until Galileo’s experiments rendered it untenable.

 

5. FISSION

Anthony Kenny, reflecting on the way in which philosophical thought gives way to science, observed that this process occurs through a kind of parturition, which he called “fission.”[26]. To illustrate this concept, Kenny turned to an example related to one of the central problems of seventeenth‑century philosophy: the question of innate ideas.

   Initially, the problem was formulated in the following way: which of our ideas are innate and which are acquired? After Kant, this question, originally obscure, was divided into two distinct inquiries: on the one hand, the investigation into the respective roles of heredity and environment in the formation of our ideas; on the other, the inquiry into how much of our knowledge can genuinely be regarded as a priori. According to Kenny, the first question was transferred to psychology, whereas the second, concerning the justification of knowledge, remained within philosophy. Subsequently, the residual issue of a priori knowledge underwent a further division, giving rise to both philosophical and non‑philosophical problems. Among its developments emerged the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. For Kenny, the notion of analyticity found a precise formulation in the works of Frege and Russell by means of mathematical logic. The question “Is arithmetic analytic?”, he wrote, received a rigorous mathematical answer in Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Despite these advances, residual questions concerning the nature and justification of mathematical truth remained unresolved, constituting the final points of philosophical contention. The following scheme summarizes Kenny’s account of this process: 

 

                                 Philosophical problem

                                       of innate ideas

 

                                             fissão

 

 

psychological question on           philosophical problem of knowing  

the paper of hereditariety            how much o four knowledge is

and of the environment in           a priori

the constitution o four ideas

 

                                                            fissão

 

 

                      logico-mathematical               philosophical questions

                      questions on the                      remaining on the nature

                      extension of apriority             and extension of our

                      in mathematics.                      a priori knowledge in

                                                                      general

 

It does not matter whether one fully agrees with the example. What matters is that the developmental model suggested here is coherent. It is a model in which broad, initially ambiguous philosophical problems gradually decompose into distinct parts. Some crystallize into scientific questions, susceptible to consensual answers, while others remain within the philosophical domain. The same process tends to repeat itself with the remaining philosophical questions, perhaps even leading to their complete disappearance, if that should be the case.

   When we consider this process of fission, the most important point to emphasize is that the loss of part of philosophy to science produces transformations that may affect the entire organization of the remaining field of philosophical inquiry. As the example illustrates, after fission, the portion of the problem that remains philosophical must be reformulated, a process that is bound to generate new conjectures. Yet these transformations do not remain confined. Other related problems belonging to the same domain of philosophical investigation may also need to be accommodated to the new scenario, together with their speculative responses. This adjustment occurs through a more or less profound reformulation of the problems and their responses, as well as through a repositioning of their relations to other problems and responses within philosophy.

   This final point can be clarified by an example: Kant’s reformulation of the lingering philosophical problem of innate ideas, articulated in his doctrine of knowledge and a priori concepts,[27] ultimately led to subsequent reconfigurations of questions concerning the concepts of world, soul, and God. At least within his theoretical philosophy, Kant ceased to conceive these concepts as designating real objects, instead treating them as ideas of reason, that is, directive concepts that we might paraphrase as “as if” (als ob, in Hans Vaihinger’s metaphor). Such ideas, generated by the very structure of reason, are a priori; however, their function is not to represent objects but rather to orient our inferential processes “as if” such objects could be designated.

   Thus, we must proceed intellectually “as if” the external world were a closed causal totality, in order to continue pursuing our knowledge of causal chains; we must proceed “as if” there were a simple permanent object (the soul), so as to be able to pursue a unified understanding of our psychic phenomena; and we must proceed “as if” there existed an intelligent creator (God) of all nature, both external and internal, conceived as an intelligible system, so as to deepen our knowledge of the external and internal world as a totality.

   As a consequence of this reformulation of the concepts of nature, soul, and God as directive a priori ideas, their functions were relocated within the conceptual framework of Kant’s philosophy. In this new context, the concept of God, for example, no longer needed nor could be regarded as that of an existing entity, fulfilling the same functions that, say, the omnipotent and truthful God had in Descartes’ pre-critical philosophy, or the role that Kant made Him assume once again in the Critique of Practical Reason as a supposedly real entity grounding morality.[28]

 

6. THE RESISTANT NUCLEUS OF RESIDUAL PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS

As a result of the development of the basic sciences, we can find a kind of fission within philosophy. On the one hand, there remains a core of philosophical resilien inquiries that form the center of gravity of traditional philosophy, like metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. On the other hand, we have the emergence of the philosophies of the basic sciences as second-order investigations, taking these sciences themselves as their objects, arising only after those sciences had developed. To see the differences, philosophy of physics asks about space, time, quantum theory, and physical laws; philosophy of chemistry examines the nature of substances and whether emergent chemical properties are reducible to physics; philosophy of biology considers what defines life and species; philosophy of psychology addresses the ontology of mental states and their representational role; and philosophy of the social sciences explores the nature of society, social ontology, and social laws...

   Philosophy of science in general, by contrast, should remain a meta-level reflection on science as a whole, while the philosophies of particular sciences are domain-specific. Although there has historically been a strong reductionist tendency that privileges the philosophy of physics, it is advisable to avoid it. In this chapter, I will thematize the most general level, asking what science in general is, independently of its many branches, since this seems to provide the right contrast between philosophy in general and the anticipation of science in general.

   Let us return to the most resilient set of philosophical inquiry, its historical center of gravity, the one that most demands our attention and that fits better with our working hypothesis of a triadic dimension of philosophy. This center resides in the disciplines traditionally regarded as the most central, significant, and difficult. They can be divided (if one wishes) into theoretical and practical domains with a variety of disciplines. The theoretical disciplines concern the input of the world into our minds, while the practical disciplines address the output of our minds into the world. The most general theoretical disciplines are metaphysics, concerning the most general kinds of things and their internal relations (properties, particulars, existence, number, causality, space, time, identity, part and whole...) and epistemology (concerning the concepts of knowledge, truth, belief, and justification, along with their internal relations and the forms of knowledge). Finally, there are practical philosophies such as the philosophy of action, ethics, philosophy of art, of culture, of history, of politics, that is, those domains related to the mind's output upon the world. Historically, ethics, from Aristotle to Kant and Derek Parfit, has been the most discussed and difficult branch of practical philosophy, due to its complexity and aporeticity. Perhaps equally relevant is political philosophy, which ranges from Plato and Hobbes to Marx and John Rawls, yet still falls short of definitive conclusions. Summarizing: the central domains of philosophy are, at least from a historical viewpoint, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. These core domains have thus far resisted assimilation into science, and it is crucial to recognize their peculiarity. They occupy neither the same theoretical level of basic sciences (or those derived from them) nor that of the philosophies of science.

   What is most striking about disciplines such as metaphysics and epistemology is their maximal range of applications. They involve many, if not all, objects of experience, both external and internal, thereby traversing the objects of inquiry of all the basic sciences. Consider the objects of metaphysics such as properties, space and time, existence, causality, number... All objects of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology also possess properties, exist in space and time, follow causal laws, can be enumerated...

   In the case of epistemology, its range of application is likewise remarkable, for its questions do not concern this or that specific form of knowledge, as we can see in the philosophies of the sciences, but rather knowledge in general, including our modest (moorean) common sense[29], such as my knowledge that I am now seated and that I am writing. The concept of knowledge is closely associated with that of truth, as well as with belief, justification, and reason.

   Given the difficulty and significance of these domains of inquiry, the question of what constitutes the nature of philosophy may, at this point, be replaced by another, no less important: what is the proper nature of philosophy’s central disciplines?

    The most serious issue concerning the idea of philosophy as a precursor to science does not lie in the indisputable fact that science emerged from philosophy, but rather in the scope of that derivation. It is possible that the remaining set of philosophical inquiries, or at least part of it, belongs essentially to philosophy, resisting its transformation into science. Or is it the case that everything that is centrally philosophical may, in principle, eventually become science?

   Philosophers diverge on this matter. Some, such as Keith Lehrer, have advanced the progressive hypothesis that philosophy is “merely the collective name for the pot of problems not yet touched by science.”[30] For him, the fact that some philosophical questions must wait more than two millennia before receiving a scientific answer does not imply that such an answer will never be found.

   Others, however, adopt a more reserved stance. Anthony Kenny, for example, argued in his book on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind for a conservative hypothesis. According to him, even though philosophy may have, in its past, handed over parts of itself to science, those parts were not genuinely philosophical. Only the remaining and clearly central philosophical domains are genuinely philosophical. For Kenny, these domains include epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the theory of meaning. Such domains, he contended, will remain philosophical forever.[31]

   In attempting to justify this claim, Kenny, drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of panoramic representation, suggested that philosophy, unlike the particular sciences, concerns itself with our knowledge as a whole. Accordingly, its aim is to organize what we already know to provide a synopsis, that is, a vision of our knowledge in its entirety. This purpose endows philosophy with a kind of comprehensiveness not found in any particular science. Such comprehensiveness, Kenny argued, is the reason why Aquinas’s philosophy of mind remains in many respects relevant:     

 

Philosophy is so comprehensive in its object of investigation, so expansive in its field of operation, that the construction of a systematic philosophical synopsis of human knowledge is so difficult that only a genius could accomplish it. So vast is philosophy that only a truly exceptional mind can discern the consequences even of the simplest philosophical arguments and conclusions.[32]

 

According to Kenny, the comprehensiveness of the philosophical task calls for the figure of the “philosophical genius”, a figure not only difficult to identify but also prone to mystification. If we apply our assumptions about the nature of philosophy to this case, the philosopher should combine the intellect of a scientist, the sensitivity of an artist, and the visionary insight of a prophet, a pattern indeed visible from Plato to Hegel. In practice, however, this genius seems to consist less in any isolated skill than in what a Kantian might describe as the harmonious integration of the faculties, since philosophy lacks a specific domain of its own.

   Consider Kant: his work exemplifies a kind of thought that depends above all on prolonged and largely unconscious ruminative labor, where the philosopher critically selects, from among countless inadequate ideas, those few that prove fruitful when articulated within broader domains of knowledge. Philosophy, in this sense, is a long, independent, and generally unconscious process.

   Nietzsche recognized this dynamic. He described the so‑called inspiration of genius as the sudden release of an unconscious accumulation of ideas, which unexpectedly find a way to connect and flow forth, as though the floodgates of an intellectual reservoir had been opened.[33] A striking example lies outside philosophy proper: Einstein’s breakthrough in 1905, when in conversation with a friend, he realized that time need not be conceived as “absolute, flowing uniformly and independently of any external factors,” as Newton had proposed. What appeared as inspiration was in fact the culmination of years of submerged reflection, suddenly crystallized into insight.[34]

   Obviously, minimally favorable external and internal conditions must be present for such epiphanies to occur. I recall a commercial that displayed a photograph of Einstein accompanied by the question: “What did he have that we do not? Answer: the program!” Yet it is worth noting that, armed with his program, Einstein made no further major discoveries during the last forty years of his life. This observation serves as a complementary consideration: inspiration and genius may ignite breakthroughs, but they do not guarantee a sustained sequence of discoveries. The unconscious accumulation of ideas, once crystallized into insight, requires not only favorable conditions but also a continual openness to new problems and perspectives. Without this, even the greatest intellect risks becoming captive to its own program.

   But I am digressing. Returning to our central question of how far philosophy can give place to science, I shall argue in favor of the progressive hypothesis that philosophy can be seen as an anticipation of science, at least concerning the central problems. At the same time, I consider this position compatible with the idea of panoramic representation, even with the notion of a scientific panoramic representation, though not in the usual reductionist way of understanding what science is.

 

7. OUR GENERAL IDEA OF SCIENCE

My suggestion that our central philosophical questions may ultimately be absorbed by science can be rendered plausible insofar as the reasons advanced by philosophers for rejecting it can be removed.

   There are two complementary reasons why philosophers like Kenny have come to reject the idea that philosophy’s central domains anticipate science.[35] The first is that, when they think of science, they have in mind primarily the well‑established experimental sciences of nature. In this context, they consider not only the methodological limitations of disciplines such as physics, but also their far more direct empirical character. To accept the progressive thesis concerning the nature of philosophy seems to commit us to an impoverished and reductive conception of the core of the remaining philosophical problems – a conception that appears to deprive philosophy of much of its breadth and relevance by leveling its problems with those of the natural sciences. To agree with the progressive hypothesis thus seems to leave us with nothing but a pedestrian form of scientism, intrinsically narrow and hostile to the breadth and abstraction to which genuine philosophizing most properly belongs.

   The second reason for disregarding the progressive hypothesis lies in the implicit adoption of conceptions of the nature of science that profoundly shaped the twentieth century, such as Logical Positivism and its cultural influence. Philosophers of science were only able to construct interesting and detailed theories insofar as they took the most developed sciences as their point of reference. Yet, since not all scientific domains are at advanced stages, and some have not even emerged, it became common for these philosophers to select the natural sciences, especially mathematical physics, as exemplary models.

   This procedure may be fruitful when applied to those consolidated sciences considered in themselves. Nevertheless, when the results are interpreted as representative of science in general, or as yielding a general criterion for demarcating what belongs to science, valid for all past and future candidates, the consequence is a narrow and restrictive conception of the boundaries of science. This is evident even in domains of basic natural science, such as biology, as illustrated by Popper’s criterion of scientificity, grounded in the falsifiability of our theories through decisive experiments.[36] That criterion may reasonably apply to physics, his model of science, for example, in measuring the deflection of starlight by the curvature of spacetime during solar eclipses, a crucial experiment that confirmed the theory of general relativity, an example often recalled by Popper. However, when applied to other areas of science, the same criterion proves excessively exclusionary. It does not apply to psychological or socio‑historical theories. It even excludes the biological theory of Evolution – a theory whose scientific status no one today would dare to deny. After all, what kind of experiment could falsify a theory that explains a myriad of processes extending over millions of years in the past? And even if it can be tested indirectly, failure to pass such a test would hardly be interpreted as a decisive refutation.[37]

   Karl Popper was right to emphasize that his methodology was not meant as a description of what people, including scientists, actually recognize as science, but rather as a proposal: a rationally grounded suggestion. Yet, when applied broadly to all forms of inquiry, it can seem overly narrow and somewhat artificial. The most natural way to distinguish philosophy from science lies in the contrast between conjectural thought, proper to philosophy, where no consensus on results is possible, and the non‑conjectural enterprise of science, where truth or falsity can be established and progress achieved. Moreover, the conception of science as a non‑conjectural pursuit that produces truth aligns closely with what scientists and educated individuals typically mean by the word science.

   Indeed, when judging whether a theory belongs to the domain of science, we do not ask, in the first place, whether it can be subjected to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation (although this aspect, as we shall see, also has its relevance). What we ask first is whether the scientific community is, in principle, capable of reaching interpersonal agreement on what it considers to be the truth or falsity of its results, even if such agreement may often not arise from a form of verification (or resistance to falsification) through empirical tests. The possibility of obtaining consensual results among scientists is a more general and decisive criterion, in contrast with the specific methods by which such agreements may in fact be achieved, though deserving to be called science.[38]

    The consequence of adopting such a model of scientificity by the philosopher is that he can no longer admit that philosophy functions as an anticipation of science. After all, it is evident that the central nuclei of philosophical inquiry, by their very nature, will never become capable of accommodating the demands imposed by models of this kind.

   Nevertheless, the two already mentioned reasons for rejecting a generalization of the hypothesis that philosophy, even in its central domains, might anticipate science as a kind of proto‑science do not apply here. For in affirming that philosophy performs an anticipatory role in relation to science, we are not bound to restrict the meaning of the word ‘science’ to the already established particular sciences. Nor are we compelled to adopt the prescriptions accepted by the heirs of logical positivism regarding how science ought to be understood.

    What most naturally comes to mind when contrasting philosophy with science seems to lie in the opposition between the conjectural or speculative thought proper to philosophy, in which no agreement on results is possible, and a non‑speculative enterprise—characteristic of science, where it is possible to reach agreement on the truth or falsity of results, thereby allowing for progress. Moreover, the idea of science as a non‑speculative undertaking that produces truth accords quite well with what we – scientists and educated individuals – naturally mean by the word science.

   Indeed, when judging whether a theory belongs to the domain of science, we do not ask, in the first place, whether it can be subjected to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation (although this feature, as we shall see, also has its relevance). What we ask first is whether the scientific community is, in principle, capable of reaching interpersonal agreement on what it considers to be the truth or falsity of its results – even if such agreement may often not arise from some form of verification (or resistance to falsification) through empirical tests. The possibility of obtaining appropriate consensual results among scientists is a more general and decisive criterion, in contrast with the specific methods by which such agreements may in fact be achieved.

   The notion that the scientific enterprise might be defined on the basis of its capacity to generate consensus struck me as too plausible to have gone unnoticed. After all, original ideas in philosophy are generally either false or have already been conceived at some point. Upon consulting the literature, I found support for a similar perspective in John Ziman's work, a physicist and sociologist of science. As early as the 1960s, Ziman emphasized the centrality of this idea, arguing that the unifying principle of science, in all its aspects, rests “on the recognition that scientific knowledge must be public and capable of achieving consensus.”[39] As he wrote:

 

The aim of science is not merely to acquire information or to state indisputable postulates; its goal is to reach a consensus of rational opinion that covers the widest possible field....[40]

 

This idea may be understood as the most general identificatory criterion of science, namely, the:

 

TRULY CONSENSUALIZABLE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

 

It is a form of public knowledge that is, at least in principle, liable to achieve agreement among peers regarding its results—something that, as we will see, does not in fact occur in pseudoscience or in philosophy.

   One advantage of admitting such a criterion is that it frees us from a strict commitment to specific models of scientificity directly derived from some well‑established basic science or from any already existing science. By adopting an open concept of the nature of science as a counterpoint to philosophical conjecture, we avoid the risk of interpreting it through the lens of positivist scientism.

   In what follows, I shall deepen the general conception of science preliminarily outlined by Ziman. Unlike philosophers such as Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and others, who devoted themselves to the problem of demarcating science from non‑science, I will not advance a normative proposal: my approach will be entirely descriptivist. My aim is to recover the generality of the technical, academic, and cultivated sense of the word ‘science’ by making explicit the principal criteria by which scientifically educated individuals recognize it. This is, therefore, a procedure parallel to that adopted by the descriptivist in metaphilosophy (Chapter I).

   Indeed, if a descriptivist approach leads us to the idea that philosophy may be regarded as a proto‑science in the sense of being unable to generate consensus, then, by parity of reasoning, the “science” of which philosophy would be “proto‑” must likewise be treated within a descriptivist framework. This approach accords with the premise that philosophy, by contrast, constitutes an inquiry that, in principle, is incapable of achieving genuine consensus regarding its results at the time they are produced.

   In fact, not only have the central domains of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, historically fallen far short of the possibility of reaching consensus. Non-central áreas like the philosophies of science and peripheral areas, such as the philosophy of medicine, of computing, of cinema, and of sport, are designated as philosophical precisely because of the absence of agreement among their factions.

   What is thereby suggested is that a descriptivist account of science provides the most coherent way of conceiving the contrast between philosophy and science within a metaphilosophical approach that is itself descriptivist. Only after we have explored this conception of science in greater depth will we be able to see whether the characterization of philosophy as an anticipation of science has any restrictive implications.

 

 

8. FOR A NON-RESTRICTIVE CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE

My aim here will not be to develop a fully descriptivist characterization of science in general, based on an analysis of the demarcation criteria actually employed by scientists, but rather to render its foundations accessible. The intention is to make sufficiently explicit, for the purpose of contrasting science and philosophy, a conception of the nature of science that may be termed consensual‑objectivist‑progressivist. According to this conception, the unifying principle of all science is that it consists in an evaluative inquiry into objective truths, enabling progress through the attainment of authentic consensual agreements among members of the scientific community regarding the results of such evaluations. To explain this idea in greater depth and to explore its implications, we may identify three conditions of scientificity, namely:

 

(i)                PROGRESSIVITY,

(ii)             CONSENSUALIZABILITY, e

(iii)          OBJETIVITY,

 

so that, as we shall see, condition (i) presupposes (ii), which presupposes (iii). These conditions are so comprehensive that they can be considered applicable to all sciences, both empirical and formal.

   With regard to condition (i), that of progressivity, it stipulates that, during its period of development, a science must behave as a progressive enterprise. This means that its theories, once proposed, should prove capable of being refined or replaced by others with greater explanatory power, or else reinforced by new ideas and theories that, in some way, enhance the explanatory capacity of the whole. Moreover, this condition implies that, in the course of its development, a science must be cumulative in its knowledge, in the sense of enabling the community of ideas to recognize the truth of an increasing number of propositions. This condition of progressivity may be formulated as follows:

 

 

C1: Science is an epistemic endeavour capable of revealing itself as progressive in the sense of enhancing the truths of its theoretical approaches.

The condition applies primarily to the whole science conceived as a structured and interconnected ensemble of particular sciences. But it can also be applied to any particular science, empirical (natural and human) or formal (logical and mathematical), which themselves can be constituted by subfields and more or less interrelated clusters of theories. In the empirical sciences, we expect progressive development even amid paradigm shifts, and in the formal sciences, we have an increasing number of theorems proven.

    Condition (ii) is central and often undervalued. It concerns the possible consensualizability noted by Ziman. It should be considered that condition C1 presupposes the satisfaction of C2. The latter, in turn, is prevalent and applies primarily to theories, hypotheses, and systems of hypotheses that aspire to scientific status insofar as they are, at least in principle, susceptible to consensual verification. Derivatively, this condition also applies to whole bodies of scientific knowledge that build any particular science. The condition of consensualizability may thus be formulated as follows:

 

C2: Science is an epistemic endeavour through which, at least in principle, it is possible to reach a legitimate consensual agreement on the truth or falsity of its theories; an agreement to be rationally reached by the critical community of ideas that propose them.

 

A proper analysis of the concept of a critical community of ideas introduced in C2 is required. This concept enables us to determine who is legitimately entitled to evaluate purportedly scientific ideas and how such evaluation is possible. There are compelling reasons to include this concept, since science is inevitably a corporate enterprise and scientific research is a social activity.

   So, for instance, if there are individuals who do not believe that the theory of natural evolution has received sufficient confirmation, this does not invalidate the belief that a scientific consensus regarding the truth of this theory may exist, given that such a consensus does, in fact, exist. Likewise, if a totalitarian government labels a spurious ideology as science and imposes a compulsory consensus on the scientific community (as occurred in the Soviet Union with Lysenkoist genetics), we would not conclude that the ideology is genuinely scientific. Nor do we believe that a community of ideas grounding its truths in the authority of sacred scriptures or in the visions of Crystal gazers is operating as a scientific community. Even if agreement exists among its members, such agreement would be regarded as arbitrary and not rationally grounded.

   The concept of a critical community of ideas is fundamental to justifying such conclusions; without this possibility, the consensualizability of its results, scientific enterprise would be inevitably compromised. The requirement that consensus be established by a critical community of ideas must serve to ensure the legitimacy or authenticity of consensus, since spurious consensuses are also possible outside the scientific domain—for example, among astrologers eager for approval. Such conditions were approximated by sociologists of science, such as R. K. Merton, and most notably by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. I wish first to consider them.

   For Merton[41], science cannot exist without social collaboration. Accordingly, it must adhere to four fundamental principles that constitute its ethos. Science must be: (1) universalist, in the sense of being open to all who can contribute to its development: “race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities are irrelevant. Objectivity excludes any form of particularism.”[42] Science must be (2) communist, in the sense of being the common property of society, with its results not restricted to individuals or groups. It must be (3) disinterested, in the sense of being pursued by individuals who seek to contribute to the common good rather than personal gain. Finally, it must exhibit (4) organized skepticism, in the sense that all scientific claims must be critically examined in a neutral manner, even at the cost of limiting the scope of scientific activity.

   The conditions established by Merton aimed merely to inventory the social ethos of science. Nevertheless, as we shall see, they also contribute to justifying the legitimacy of scientific consensus.

   An analysis explicitly intended to confer legitimacy upon consensus was advanced by Jürgen Habermas in his consensual theory of truth.[43] His proposal, which strikes at the heart of the matter, was that the determination of what counts as truth must rest upon a discourse (Diskurs) conducted under the presupposition of an ideal speech situation (ideale Sprachsituation). To the preceding conditions, I now add Habermas’s requirements, setting aside possible overlaps:

 

(5) Unrestricted Access to Discourse: All participants must have the right to take part in dialogue. No one may be arbitrarily excluded.

(6) Equality of Opportunities for Expression: Everyone must have the same chance to present claims, ask questions, raise objections, and articulate needs or desires.

(7) Freedom of Expression: Participants must be able to express themselves without external coercion, that is, without fear of punishment, manipulation, social pressure, or rhetorical artifices.

(8) Truthfulness: Interlocutors must be sincere in their intentions, guided by truth-oriented purposes—that is, by intentions aimed at seeking the truth. Lies or manipulations undermine the validity of discourse.[44]

(9) Comprehensibility: The language employed must be clear and understandable to all those involved.

(10) Rational Justifiability: Assertions must be capable of rational justification and remain permanently open to critique.

 

Mainly, for Habermas, what must prevail is what he called “the effortless force of the better argument,” rather than any argument from authority. Although this set of conditions may not be sufficient to guarantee truth, it is, nonetheless, to a sufficient degree, necessary: truth can only emerge from a consensus achieved through a discourse free of coercion, in which participants seek mutual understanding on the basis of the force of the better argument, and not through the imposition of power.

   Habermas’s theory was not conceived to test the requirements of science, but rather to evaluate the claim to truth in general. Nevertheless, when we restrict ourselves to the scientific domain, two further conditions may still be invoked:

 

(11) Competence: all participants should be equally well trained and informed about the topics to be discussed.

(12) Transparency: all participants should have the right to receive all available information.

What I have called a critical community of ideas is nothing more than a society of ideas that sufficiently satisfies all twelve conditions. I say “sufficiently” because, when we consider the concrete practice of science, we observe that it invariably fails to fulfill them in their entirety. Nevertheless, here is where the danger rests: if these conditions are not met to a sufficient degree, it is certain that science, as a collective enterprise, will become profoundly flawed, if not altogether impossible.

   Our question, then, is whether these eleven conditions (all of them quite reasonable) are sufficient to guarantee the legitimacy of scientific consensus. Consider the dialectical pseudoscience practiced by Trofim Lysenko in Stalin’s Russia. Lysenko was a charlatan who rejected classical genetics and advocated the inheritance of acquired characteristics in plants, along with useless methods such as subjecting seeds to cold in order to force growth. Stalin believed blindly in Lysenko, and his government persecuted anyone who dared to disagree. The results were repeated failures, always justified by factors extraneous to his pseudoscience.

   We may assert that, in Stalin’s Russia, the conditions for genuine consensus were absent, since the prerequisites identified by Habermas – (5) unrestricted access to discourse, (6) equality of opportunities for expression, (7) freedom of expression (above all), and (8) truthfulness—were not fulfilled. Likewise, the more general conditions outlined by Merton were, in part, disregarded. The requirements of (2) universalism, (3) disinterestedness, and (4) organized skepticism were lacking. Even condition (11), the sufficient competence of participants, was clearly unmet, as a direct consequence of the failure to satisfy the preceding conditions.

   A very similar phenomenon occurred with the so‑called “Aryan physics” promoted under Nazi‑fascist totalitarianism, which rejected the contributions of Jewish scientists such as Einstein and Niels Bohr. Its proponents sought to replace “Jewish physics” with “Aryan physics,” dismissing both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Here, above all, Merton’s condition (1), universalism, was violated, since collaboration from scientists of Jewish origin was categorically excluded, together with Habermas’ conditions (5) and (6).

   By comparison, practices such as card reading, crystal ball gazing, or astrology likewise fail to satisfy several of the aforementioned conditions. It is virtually impossible for them to meet condition (4), organized skepticism, or condition (10), openness to criticism. This is easily demonstrated. Let us consider astrology alone. From the standpoint of physics, astrology is absurd. Carl Sagan observed that the gravitational force exerted by the obstetrician’s abdomen on a newborn at the moment of birth is greater than that of the Moon at the same instant.

   On the methodological plane, Karl Popper highlighted a recurrent stratagem in astrology: the reliance on vagueness. If predictions are sufficiently imprecise, even apparent failures can be reinterpreted by the astrologer, rendering them unfalsifiable.

   James Randi, the professional magician who dedicated himself to exposing pseudoscientific frauds and who offered a one‑million‑dollar prize to anyone able to demonstrate the existence of paranormal forces or similar phenomena, was never able to award the prize to any claimant. According to Randi, while some individuals were indeed charlatans, most genuinely believed in their alleged paranormal powers. In a well‑known experiment, Randi distributed sheets of paper to a class of students containing astrological predictions based on their date and time of birth. The vast majority judged the predictions to be sufficiently accurate. Yet when he asked them to exchange their sheets with those of the classmates behind them, the surprise was immediate: all the predictions were identical.

   This experiment not only exposes the futility of astrology but also illustrates the power of suggestion and self‑deception in the human mind.

   It thus appears that, by bringing together the twelve conditions considered thus far, we are able to establish a sufficiently robust distinction between legitimate and illegitimate consensus. As has already been noted, it is important to emphasize that these conditions constitute an ideal constellation that no scientific community ever fully satisfies. Nevertheless, they must be met to a sufficient degree, since no scientific community can achieve reliability without at least minimal compliance.

   Indeed, when we accept a scientific discovery as true, for instance, a breakthrough in medicine, we must all presuppose that such criteria are being adequately fulfilled: that scientists are honest, that they are not under pressure to manipulate data, among other requirements. Hence, the importance of experimental replication by independent laboratories. This was precisely the case with Dolly the sheep, the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult cell. At first, other laboratories were unable to reproduce the demanding cloning experiment. It took two years for this practical difficulty to be fully resolved.

   Moreover, the scientist engaged in research must conduct their work under the constant assumption that, at some point, the results will be evaluated by a critical community of ideas, capable of applying criteria that ensure their consensual legitimacy. This assumption should guide a continuous process of self‑evaluation of what is being produced, even if such external evaluation never materializes – as in the case of Gregor Mendel – or perhaps never occurs at all, given that the outcome of sound research may be lost like a flower blooming in the desert, never to be seen. Conceived in this way, condition C2, of legitimate consensual agreement regarding results, becomes the central requirement for accepting a theory as belonging to the domain of science.

   Agreement on the truth or falsity of theories within a critical community of ideas requires a third condition of scientificity – one that acknowledges a debt to more traditional philosophy of science. As noted earlier, consensual agreement on truth among members of such a community is possible only if there is prior agreement on the assumptions underlying the criteria and methods for evaluating scientific truth. Thus, the fulfillment of condition C2 presupposes the satisfaction of condition C3: a material requirement that the critical community must meet in order to be considered scientific. This is what can be called the condition of objectivity, which may be formulated as follows.

 

C3: The critical community of ideas responsible for scientific inquiry must be grounded in a prior consensual agreement regarding what counts as foundational assumptions and the methodologies that enable the intersubjective evaluation of the theories developed within it. The existence of a previously legitimized consensus on these assumptions confers objectivity upon scientific discourse.

 

   Agreement on the truth or falsity of theories requires, within a critical community of ideas, a prior consensual agreement on foundational assumptions that confer objectivity on scientific discourse. Without attempting an exhaustive clarification, and taking epistemic domain to mean the set of entities regarded as foundational within a given field of scientific knowledge, we propose that a critical community must achieve a previous agreement regarding the following fundational assumptions, in order to endow scientific objectivity to any epistemic domain:

 

(i)               Elementary data or axioms: Assumptions about what counts as elementary data within the epistemic domain (e.g., sensory data in empirical sciences, or axioms in formal systems).

(ii)             Methodological procedures: Assumptions concerning valid methods for evaluating the truth of a theory, including explanatory and predictive power, which should imply some form of correspondence with reality.

(iii)          Properly formulated questions: Assumptions about what qualifies as legitimate questions or problems within the epistemic domain, ensuring that theories address relevant and meaningful issues.

(iv)           Properly constructed theories: Assumptions regarding the criteria of their theories' internal consistency, as well as external alignment with established knowledge.

 

These assumptions must be conceived as encompassing the broadest possible spectrum, though their specific content will inevitably vary according to the epistemic domain to which they belong.

   Assumption (i) is associated with the issue of generality of scientific theories; assumption (ii) with explanatory and/or predictive power of scientific theories; assumption (iii) with the adequacy of the questions formulated; and assumption (iv) with the coherence and sound entrenchment of scientific views.

   The admission of such foundations of scientific objectivity makes it possible to establish a bridge between two conceptions of science: on the one hand, science as a form of knowledge subject to legitimate public consensus achieved by a critical community of ideas that we have considered beforehand; on the other, the traditional conception of the scientific method in the empirical sciences, understood as inductive–deductive or hypothetico–deductive, which abstracts the social character of science.

   Are such associations inevitable? Could there be a legitimate consensual agreement without such conditions of objectivity being satisfied, for instance, by the supposedly critical community of astrologers, crystal-ball seers, or tea-leaf readers? I think not. It is indispensable that the foundational assumptions constitutive of the condition of objectivity be fulfilled in order for a critical community to achieve legitimate consensus. It is necessary, for example, that a theory possess a confirmed predictive (or demonstrative) power, which is encompassed by assumption (ii).

   But the skeptic will ask: what guarantees that it must be so? The answer is that this question appears problematic only to the skeptic, who expects an a priori solution, a logical or necessary guarantee, which, in fact, does not exist. What is at stake here is an empirical and experiential matter. Experience has shown us, again and again, that legitimate consensus can only be formed when the conditions of objectivity are satisfied.

   The necessity of admitting conditions of objectivity, and of demonstrating their applicability, is an inescapable experiential truth—one that critical communities of ideas have been compelled to learn in order to constitute themselves. Human beings have simply observed, perhaps reluctantly, that legitimate consensus can only be achieved when such conditions are satisfied.

   A definition of science that fails to recognize these experiential conditions of objectivity, which in their contents will materially vary from one scientific domain to another, from astrophysics to social history, would be destined to fall into dogmatism.

   One could object that the discovery of data and methodology within an epistemic domain is already the result of theory-laden conventional agreement; as a consequence, we have circularity: condition (C2) of possible conventional agreement demands the satisfaction of condition (C3), which demands the satisfaction of (C2). The answer is that there is no circularity, since conventional agreements delimiting our search for grounding data are not at the same level as the conventional results. Moreover, there can be a dynamic interplay between C3 and C2: objectivity evolves with consensus, and consensus evolves with objectivity.  We can even undergo epistemic shifts that change what counts as data, procedures, and theoretical results. But this does not matter, provided that continuity of inquiry is preserved, even if the boundaries of the field are redefined.

   What I have just presented may be termed a progressivist–consensualist–objectivist definition of the scientific enterprise in general. Understood in this way, the conditions of progressivity, consensuality, and objectivity constitute a sufficiently reliable descriptivist criterion for distinguishing between science (whether empirical or even formal) and non-science, as well as for identifying what cannot be considered scientific, regardless of its nature. Summarizing, in its broadest sense, science is a collective pursuit of truth, potentially progressive in its discoveries, consensualizable in its judgements, and objective in its foundations.

   In light of the considered view of science in itas broadest sense, let us now examine what occurs when we compare this general definition of science with our characterization of the philosophical enterprise.

 

 

9. WHY CONCEIVE OF PHILOSOPHY AS A PROTOSCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOUR?

The point to emphasize is that the consensualist conception of science just outlined places it in direct contrast to philosophy. Unlike science, philosophy is neither progressivist, nor consensualist, nor objectivist. Nevertheless, both share a common feature: both need the appeal to a critical community of ideas, though this requires some qualifications.

   In both philosophy and science, a critical community of ideas must be presupposed – even if only counterfactually. Hegel, for instance, likely secured his position by presenting the Prussian state as the embodiment of reason. Schopenhauer, by contrast, remained largely ignored until the age of sixty-three, when the popular success of Parerga und Paralipomena finally brought him recognition. Nietzsche, unlike both, never achieved acceptance during his lifetime, yet he consistently wrote with the expectation of a future community of readers capable of grasping the scope of his thought. In each case, the philosopher presupposed – counterfactually – a community of ideas that could evaluate their work. Importantly, what they sought was not validation of their philosophy as true in the scientific sense, but rather acknowledgment that their writings were worthwhile as philosophical contributions.

   One of the conditions that the philosophical community of ideas demands is that philosophers must possess competence for their activities. Since this competence cannot be the same as that of scientists, some considerations need to be made regarding it. One such condition may be familiarity with the development of science, at least in its principles and proportionally to its relation to the area of philosophy under investigation, insofar as such a relation can be found. Philosophy cannot be admitted when it contradicts what in its time is considered well‑established scientific truths. Beyond this, philosophical competence resides in mastery of a tradition of critical discussion. This mastery may be limited: Hume, for example, was practically confined to the English tradition in which he was situated, as he knew little of the Greek and medieval tradition. Wittgenstein knew only what he learned alongside Russell and what he heard in Vienna and Cambridge, and he responded to it critically with extraordinary originality. But in some cases, the mastery of the tradition was considerable: Kant, for instance, was deeply familiar with Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Spinoza, and he also engaged with the Greek tradition (Plato and Aristotle) and some scholastic medieval philosophy. His Critique of Pure Reason is often read as a synthesis and response to these traditions. Ideally, mastery of the tradition should be as broad as possible, at least in what pertains to the domain or subdomain under consideration, as was the case with Aristotle and Kant.[45] Since Plato, to do philosophy has meant aligning oneself, even if critically, with a tradition.

   A characteristic of the critical community of ideas in academic philosophy is that, even if it is not capable of directly accessing truth, as in science, it is at least able to identify which views have rendered it improbable or clearly false. In the long run, the exclusion of the most implausible views is one of the few achievements of which the philosophical community can boast. Moreover, philosophers are presumed to seek truth and are willing (even if reluctantly) to submit their philosophical theories to the free critical scrutiny of other thinkers, equally or more competent, in an effort to satisfy conditions (i) to (iv) from C3, which gives their theories a minimum of objectivity. Finally, it is expected that the philosophical community will at least satisfy enough of the twelve conditions of consensual legitimacy (C2) listed above, even if it remains incapable of achieving sufficient consensuability (C1) on any matter.

   As has already been observed, the critical community of ideas may, in science, and certainly also, to some extent, in philosophy, suffer from limitations, distortions, and pathologies. A classic example in philosophy was the religious coercion of the medieval period: condition (7), concerning freedom, was not satisfied by anything that might in any way conflict with religious dogmas. At present, Anglophone analytic philosophy faces limitations, such as scholasticism, scientism, hermeticism, fragmentation, and hyper-specialization – features Susan Haack identifies as symptoms of a dysfunctional academic community.

   Scientism is a worldview that regards science as the sole path to truth. Scientism leads to scientificism, the overconfidence in formalist theorizatons or in empiricist research.[46] The former is too often found in contemporary analytic philosophers. Symbolic logic, which in the time of Frege and Russell was used to sharpen our understanding of the world, is now often used beyond its limits, to blend our views. As Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith noted in a well‑known article, even if there can be important formalist philosophical works, it is all too common for contemporary analytic philosophers to take refuge in hermetic formalism over engaging with the confusing and complex nature of the real world. As they wrote:

 

F(a)ntological philosophy triumphs, because elegantly structured possible worlds are so much more pleasant places to explore than the flesh and blood reality which surrounds us here on Earth... But a philosophical tradition that suffers from the vice of horror mundi in an endemic way is condemned to futility.[47]

 

 

Scientificism is closely linked to fragmentation and hyper‑specialization in philosophy, for in order to mimic, philosophically, the procedures of a scientific domain, one must hypostatize it, excluding anything that might call it into question. Scientificism is also close to reductionism.

  As for overspecialization, in a world where knowledge expands far beyond our capacity to assimilate it, specialization becomes a matter of intellectual survival. The motto is “divide and conquer”, and in this regard reductionism becomes the guiding principle. However, such a dysfunction risks obscuring the conditions for the legitimacy of consensus from (1) to (12), which are more appropriate to philosophical practice.[48]

   It is important to note that, although we are dealing with a limited critical community of ideas – one grounded in a tradition of specialists in the field and in adjacent áreas – the reflections of philosophers have not been able to meet any of the three conditions of scientificity considered here: namely, the absence of linear progress, consensus, and objectivity. This allows us to characterize philosophy in purely negative terms, as a truth-seeking enterprise undertaken on the assumption of a critical community of ideas in which such conditions remain unmet. The negative conditions include, first:

 

NC1: Philosophy fails to satisfy the condition of progressivity C1, since it is not a progressive enterprise capable of a growing and reasonably linear increasing of knowledge.

 

 

Timothy Williamson rightly defended an incremental view of philosophy, according to which it advances through increasing argumentative rigor, gradual refinement, and the accumulation of insights.[49] This is fairly evident. Yet there is more to be said. Beyond this, one can discern modest but substantive progress: ideas once regarded as plausible have come to seem unpalatable or archaic, while, conversely, notions previously dismissed as uninteresting or implausible may gain renewed significance. The Timaeus, a theological-speculative work composed in Plato’s later years, was the most influential dialogue in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, for obvious mystical reasons. After the Renaissance, however, the Republic was rediscovered as the most important dialogue, owing to its rational and dialectical argumentation concerning the central doctrines of the Platonic system.

   Another example concerns Kant’s so‑called Copernican revolution. In formulating it, he assumed that Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics represented absolute truths. On this basis, he believed that by appealing to the synthetic a priori judgments that underpinned them, we became legislators of the universe. In other words, the structure of reality must conform to the conditions of our sensible intuition and understanding, as if by divine miracle. Less than a century later, however, this vision began to unravel. New geometries, such as the hyperbolic and the elliptic, were developed, challenging the exclusivity of Euclidean geometry. Worse still, in 1915, Einstein reformulated the concept of gravitation with his general theory of relativity, showing that in the vicinity of massive bodies, space‑time follows a Riemannian elliptic geometry rather than a Euclidean one. Neither Newton’s laws nor Euclidean geometry proved capable of accounting for the real world with sufficient precision. As a result, much of the impetus behind the Copernican revolution lost its force: we are no longer legislators of the universe, but interpreters of a reality that often exceeds the natural frameworks of our understanding.

   Advancement in philosophy differs profoundly from the progress observed in fields such as biology. Rather than unfolding through linear development, philosophical progress occurs by narrowing possibilities and accumulating alternatives. Yet this advancement is almost imperceptible: partial gains are often offset by setbacks, and what remains is a long history of hypotheses, some occasionally correct, without certainty as to which are valid or to what extent. At best, philosophy has succeeded in eliminating overly implausible ideas. For once a hypothesis achieves certainty, it ceases to be philosophy and becomes science. Bertrand Russell likened philosophers to the “Pilgrim Fathers,” who continually moved westward, fleeing civilization (here understood as science), which, once established, ends philosophical labor by subjecting imagination to reason. Unlike the scientist, the philosopher seeks to preserve a space for the free exercise of imagination, resisting the closure imposed by certainty.

   In philosophy, what accumulates positively is a hypothetical content, in the sense that our philosophical conjectures can be rendered more complex, increasing both in number and, at times, in plausibility. Philosophy thus amasses an ever‑growing set of possible truths, which tends to narrow the mesh of the speculative network across its various domains.

   The accumulative character of hypotheses, though not necessarily of knowledge, common to philosophy, becomes readily apparent when we compare different philosophical theories of the past. Consider, for instance, the systems of Kant and Hegel. Kant was a transcendental idealist and empirical realist, concerned primarily with epistemological questions regarding our cognitive structure and its limits. Hegel, by contrast, was an absolute idealist, interested in a process philosophy centered on the historical evolution of humanity and of moral, aesthetic, and religious cultures. Each system appears to illuminate distinct speculative domains; each must contain some truth, and together they are likely to contain more truths than in isolation.

    The difficulty, however, is that we are not in a position to determine with sufficient certainty where those truths lie, to what extent they hold, nor to dismiss skeptical doubts about them, and even less to compare the systems in any conclusive way. If we attempt to compare, for example, the philosophy of Democritus with that of Parmenides, or Spinoza with Leibniz, we find ourselves approaching the domain of incommensurability.

   The reasons for incommensurability are easily explained: one philosopher begins from the set of premises (A) in order to arrive at (M) by the procedure (P); another philosopher begins from the set of premises (B) in order to arrive at (N) by the procedure (Q). Yet no one is in a position to compare either the value of (A) and (B), or the value of the procedures (P) and (Q) by which the results (M) and (N) are obtained. At least until the end of the nineteenth century, this description remains entirely appropriate.

   Philosophy distinguishes itself from science by its inability to satisfy conditions C1, C2, and C3. Condition C1, that of being a progressive enterprise, has not been met by philosophy, since it fails to satisfy its precondition, namely, consensualizability. Hence, with respect to C2, the following applies to philosophy:

 

NC2: Philosophy fails to satisfy the condition of consensualizability C2, since no agreement regarding the truth or falsity of its hypotheses can be reached within its critical community of ideas.

 

  

The best that can occur is the acceptance of new philosophicals views for discussion. This is so because, in one way or another, the condition of objectivity is not minimally satisfied:

NC3: Philosophy fails to satisfy the conditions of objectivity C3, since the philosopher is unable, before the critical community of ideas, to establish foundational presuppositions upon which consensus can be reached.

 

In fact, philosophers are unable to satisfy any of the four fundamental assumptions of scientific objectivity. They are unable to:

 

 

(i)               to reach consensus regarding what may be counted as elementary data within the epistemic domains of philosophy.

(ii)             to reach consensus regarding what can be qualified as the right methodological procedures for the evaluation of the explanatory and/or predictive power of theories.

(iii)          To reach consensus regarding properly formulated questions and problems within the epistemic domain.

(iv)           o reach consensus regarding the properly constructed theory in terms of its internal and external consistency.

 

Since, in terms of satisfaction, C1 depends on C2, C2 on C3, and C3 on the presuppositions (i)–(iv), it becomes evident that, ultimately, philosophy does not configure itself as science, for it is unable to sufficiently meet the required conditions of objectivity.

   Regarding the case of the anticipation of the sciences, this means that philosophical views, in the time of their elaboration, were not intrinsically capable of satisfying the conditions imposed by scientific methods. After all, it is the conditions of progressivity, consensuality, and objectivity that enable science to expand its scientific horizon far beyond what previously seemed possible.

   We therefore conclude that these three conditions – progressivity, consensuality, and objectivity – correspond exemplarily to the criteria we intuitively employ in distinguishing what belongs to the domain of science from what remains confined to the field of philosophy. The former satisfies them; the latter does not.

 

10. SOME CONSEQUENCES OF WHAT WAS PROPOSED

When philosophy is regarded as an enterprise that anticipates science, the adoption of the general conception of science just outlined yields noteworthy consequences.

   First, since the proposed criteria for defining what may be considered science leave open the concrete ways in which an inquiry might come to be recognized as scientific, the very identity of the investigation that will emerge from philosophical activity remains open. In other words, the suggested criteria do not anticipate the specific profile of any scientific field yet to arise. More importantly, they do not require that future sciences, those destined to occupy the space presently dominated by philosophy, bear any resemblance to the sciences already well established. This, in itself, imposes a significant barrier to the grandest aspirations of scientistic reductionism.

   Even broad speculative theories, such as Comte’s law of the three stages, Max Weber’s thesis on the disenchantment of the world, Freud’s metapsychology, or Herbert Marcuse’s thesis of repressive desublimation, may ultimately fall under this expanded conception of science, insofar as our knowledge grows. For this to occur, it would suffice that they be reinforced and even corrected by subsequent discoveries, forming a body of information and methods that render them capable of achieving consensus within a critical community of ideas.

   At this point, it is worth considering the concept of consilience (from con = together, saliens = leap, meaning “joint leap”). This concept was introduced by William Whewell in 1840 to designate the convergence of inductions drawn from diverse classes of facts. It was revived in the twentieth century by E. O. Wilson, who understood it as the synthesis of facts and theories from different disciplines, aimed at producing a unified understanding of reality.[50] In his book, Wilson demonstrates how the natural and human sciences are interconnected in ways that mutually reinforce one another. Finally, Susan Haack applied the concept of consilience to philosophy. According to her:   

 

What I mean is that there is a real world, a “pluralistic universe”, to borrow James's phrase, and that all the truths about this complex and varied world somehow combine.[51]

 

We can hold the presupposition a unity of reality functioning here as a normative ideal: if we admit that reality is in some sense unified, then scientific theories that are closely related to one another should be able to complement and mutually reinforce each other in their relation to truth, reinforcing one another in a way that remembers a crossword puzzle. A good example, among many others, is the relationship between molecular genetics, Mendelian genetics, the theory of natural evolution, and paleontological and geological data. These theories and data mutually complement one another, reinforcing one another’s validity.

   As we said, Haack’s innovation consisted of applying the idea of consilience to philosophical theories. If different subfields of philosophy contain elements of truth and are interconnected, then, by the principle of consilience, these elements should mutually reinforce one another. Applying the idea of consilience to the supposition that philosophy is protoscience means that ideas belonging to areas of knowledge complementary to a given domain of philosophy – whether philosophical or not – should be capable of reinforcing the true ideas belonging to that same domain and, by contrast, weakening the false ones.

   This assumption leads us to a provocative conclusion: the overlapping of truths coming from multiple directions can tighten the knots of the web of knowledge, gradually bringing the interrelated results of philosophical speculation closer to a legitimate consensus regarding their truth, that is, to science, insofar as science is understood as an objective form of knowledge genuinely capable of consensual validation. If we accept this idea, much of philosophical thought, whether speculative or not, may in principle contain elements of truth which, once reconstructed, refined, and further developed, could allow for a legitimate consensual agreement about their truth, an agreement that cannot be realized if philosophy is fragmented into scientistic theses that force it to be what it is not.

   Even a philosophical conception of the nature of philosophy, such as the one being developed in the present book, could cease to be merely philosophical and become scientific if, when applied to itself, it proves capable of achieving legitimate consensus regarding its results. Suppose, for instance, that the conception of philosophy as, in large part, a protoscience anticipating science, consistent with the progressivist-consensualist-objectivist conception outlined here, were to withstand criticism and be further developed in a more adequate and complete way. Suppose further that, in the future, this conception were confirmed by the emergence of new scientific fields and data that evolve replacing our current conjectures. One consequence of this would be that a critical community of ideas would eventually accept, by legitimate consensus, the truth of the claim that (i) the most general characteristic of philosophy is that it is not capable of achieving legitimate and objective consensus with regard to its results; and (ii) at least in its more traditional centers of gravity, philosophy presents itself as a proto-science in the sense of being capable of transforming into a field susceptible to authentic consensual agreements, thereby becoming scientifically unobjectionable. In this case, the view of philosophy as a proto-science would satisfy the general condition of scientificity that it itself established.

   As has already been noted, a relevant consequence of our conception of science, insofar as it concerns philosophy, is that it justifies an alternative to fragmentary and reductionist scientistic maneuvers. It justifies, in many cases, that we need not eliminate the breadth of our philosophical visions by admitting them as replaceable by a diversity of scientific theories. Something different may be expected. In reflecting on the interdependence of the most central philosophical problems (such as those of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, theory of action, ethics, philosophy of culture, etc.), I recall the observation attributed to Wittgenstein,  according to whom the difficulty of philosophy lies in the fact that its problems are so interconnected that a single problem can only be fully resolved when all the others are resolved as well.

   Although Wittgenstein’s remark is an obvious hyperbole, it highlights a way in which central philosophical problems may give rise to science: not by constructing theories directly demonstrable through the empirical facts they seek to explain, but through consilience, namely, through the mutual support theories provide one another, their cooperative explanatory power, the stronger entrenchment of whatever truth they contain, and, ultimately, their indirect yet genuine agreement with the facts.

   There are, finally, some conclusions to be drawn from the recognition that, in much of philosophical inquiry, the intertheoretical support derived from consilience can prevail as a coherential means of evaluating truth.

   The first conclusion is that there are few reasons to abandon the optimistic belief that in central domains of the philosophical tradition, sooner or later we will be able to find a path toward legitimate consensual agreement, a transformation that can occur through complete reconstruction, transformation, rejections, or by the dissolution of problems critique of language. The existence of only five basic sciences seems to reinforce this expectation. On the other hand, there are cases such as process philosophies (including political philosophies), philosophies of life, of technology etc., whose truth depends on an unpredictable human history, which tends to make them resistant to the possibility of generalized consensus.

   A second conclusion is that, in light of the principle of consilience, there is no reason to expect that the central problems of philosophy will disperse into a multitude of mini-theories without any prospect of consensus. On the contrary, it is to be expected that they will be addressed by theories that are more or less comprehensive and interconnected with one another through consilience. In this scenario, only the conjectural form of the problems will tend to disappear, and not their scope.

   A third conclusion, indicated by the reinforcing interdependence of the truth-claims of theories, is that we cannot disqualify philosophical attempts in areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics merely by analogy with what happened to many philosophical conjectures that anticipated sciences such as physics, chemistry, or biology, which ultimately proved to be simply too rudimentary or erroneous, retaining only a residual historical value.

   In the natural sciences, beginning with physics, profound epistemic ruptures occurred, separating the emergence of these scientific bodies from the pre-scientific philosophical inquiry that preceded them, generally false and incapable of achieving consensus. Consider, for example, what is happening with the Aristotelian concept of material substance, which is constituted by matter and a defining principle that he calls form. This explanatory key has been effectively explored in Kathrin Koslicki’s[52] hylomorphic investigation of the construction of material objects, which is implicitly grounded in consilience, bringing it closer to the truth. This suggests that the transition from philosophy’s central domains to science occurs more gradually, as it involves refinements and corrections of interrelated ideas rather than an abrupt leap into something entirely new.

   This implies that philosophical speculation in its central domains—such as Aristotle’s theory of substance, his ethics, Descartes’ cogito, Leibniz’s relational theory of space, Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and Kant’s theory of concepts—may, as has long been suspected, continue to hold significant relevance for the present day.

   Even though we do not yet know precisely how to evaluate such truths, it is plausible that they accumulate over time until sufficiently robust consensus allows for the correction of errors, the elimination of confusion, and the promotion of convincing refinements in a more urbane and discreet manner. Recognizing this phenomenon is important for understanding the value of the fundamental philosophical disciplines in their historical context, a dimension often neglected by positivist scientism.

 

11. ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY: DECLINE AND FALL

Several authors have noted the decline of Anglophone analytic philosophy, a tradition that, over the past four decades has conquered the world, while continental philosophies, both German and French, have nearly faded into obscurity.[53] As already noted, the symptoms of this decline may be described as scholasticism,[54] scientism,[55] hermeticism,[56] fragmentation,[57] hyper-specialization,[58] and superficiality.[59]

   The blemish of scholasticism is stagnation. Theoretical assumptions inherited from the past are accepted dogmatically, while debates circle around minute, abstract, and technical distinctions—designed less to illuminate than to generate artificial complexities that never dare to challenge the so‑called “received wisdom.” What is missing are disruptive innovations. The last philosopher I recall who truly produced them is Jürgen Habermas.

   Yet scholasticism is an effect, not the cause. The root of the problem lies in scientism. We live in a society where science, and even more so, technology, occupies an ever‑expanding space. Scholars believe in science as the ancients believed in the gods. The problem arises when the scientistic mindset spills over into philosophy. Although philosophy may, and indeed must, draw upon scientific advances, it cannot be absorbed into contemporary science without losing its very shape, precisely because of the otherness of its scientific potential. Wittgenstein, as early as the 1930s, after his 1929 year with close dialogue with the logical positivists (physicists, logicians, economists…), philosophers who sought to reduce philosophy to something akin to the successful hard sciences they already knew, summed up his critique of scientism in the following words:

 

Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the same way that science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics.[60]

 

The attempt to elevate philosophy by grounding its ideas in resources borrowed from new technical‑scientific domains—whether formal or empirical—betrays a reductionist stance. In this process, philosophy tends to exclude whatever proves incompatible, treating it as irrelevant. Such insularity, this “placing in parentheses” that abstracts away anything that could lead to contradiction, allows scientistic theory to become autonomous: self‑referential in its evaluations, detached from its relation to the wider body of knowledge, and thereby estranged from knowledge itself.

   As I noted in Chapter I, reductionism can be productive, as in Kripke’s profound reflections on reference and existence. Yet its limits soon appear: once exclusion has taken place, it becomes all too easy to subdivide the theoretical domain into new sub‑specialties whose plausibility can only be challenged externally, that is, from what has already been excluded. In this way, a fertile ground for fragmentation is opened. Without consilience, each scientistic‑reductionist field evolves in isolation, lacking dialogue with others, since they no longer are allowed to sustain one another under the presupposition of deep interconnection.

 Here, the path to hyper‑specialization opens: the proliferation of sub‑theories increasingly remote from any plausible outcome, counterproductive constructions of Castalia’s world: abstract, self‑contained, and devoid of concrete relevance, incapable of leading us forward. As Susan Haack aptly summed it up:

 

Hyper‑specialization hinders progress rather than enabling it, for it means that time and energy are inevitably wasted on a niche of problems that will not survive the half‑baked theories from which they originated.[61]

 

To explain how philosophical hyper‑specialization develops, Haack coined the expression “premature specialization” to designate the most harmful form of scientistic fragmentation within the field of knowledge. As she observed, specialization is welcome in the sciences, whose solid foundations allow for further advances. In philosophy, however, premature specialization occurs upon foundations which, though dogmatically accepted by their practitioners, lack solidity, especially since other competing groups choose equally precarious foundations.

   The result is that the “funny hypotheses” these philosophers invent, together with the mini‑theories that follow, lead nowhere, serving only to occupy their adherents for a good number of years. Haack ironically describes them as forming self‑promoting cliques (“little gangs, niches, cartels, and fiefdoms”), citation cartels among peers, and producers of niche literature whose hermeticism makes it accessible only to their accomplices. In the end, she writes, boredom sets in and the “funny hypothesis” is replaced by a new conjecture equally sterile[62] – without any problem ever being resolved.

   Worse still is when these mini‑theories persist, subdivide, and multiply without end, giving rise to a proliferation of mini-sub‑theories. A striking example is the metalinguistic account of proper‑name reference in the philosophy of language. According to this decades‑old proposal, a proper name refers by means of a description such as “the bearer of ‘N’,” with N being the name itself. This idea is manifestly inadequate: it fails to distinguish one proper name from another, since all are intended to designate a possible bearer. To be told that the bearer of the name ‘Aristotle’ is the one to whom the name ‘Aristotle’ refers is merely to learn that the name designates a certain individual, without shedding any light on how the name is actually used to refer to Aristotle.

   Nevertheless, even today, dozens of theoretical variations continue to proliferate from this initially implausible reductionist conjecture, sustaining a specialized discourse that appears futile to all but those few specialists who have invested years of effort in it. Similar patterns can be observed across other domains of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.

   The problem with these procedures is that they are far from innocuous. Beyond serving as intellectual exercises that enable specialists to debate, publish, convene at conferences, and secure grants, they readily obstruct the emergence of disruptive innovations – innovations capable of reshaping entire fields by reworking their foundations – precisely because such breakthroughs would undermine the very industry of philosophical trivialities on which these practices depend.[63]

   Before proceeding, I should note that my discussion here is restricted to disruptive innovations in central areas. Adaptive or incremental innovations, including new interpretations and reconstructions, are generally welcomed by the philosophical status quo, as they are readily assessable and do not threaten the work of specialists or the entrenched intellectual hierarchy. This is true, for example, of the excellent introductions published by Routledge[64], or by Oxford University Press[65], or by Kathrin Koslicki’s reconstruction of Aristotelian hylomorphism.[66] Nor do I object to targeted studies related to an emerging scientific field, where philosophical questions naturally arise. Likewise, para-philosophical and historical studies can be of great value, as much as applied philosophy, as the extraordinary Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy demonstrates. But these are not my concern here.

   Returning to the point: although one might concede that the proliferation of mini‑theories born of positivist fragmentation can serve to “keep the conversation going” (as Richard Rorty puts it), offering at least some motivational value for scientists and educated audiences, in practice they have increasingly functioned as obstacles rather than stimuli to the emergence of truly disruptive internal developments, which, ultimately, are the only innovations that can be considered genuinely indispensable.

   I have a personal experience that illustrates why it is so difficult to produce disruptive work today. I refer to my book How Do Proper Names Really Work?, published in 2023. It represents the culmination of a research project begun around 2007, from which several other publications also emerged. I believe this book offers a concrete example of how the ever‑expanding array of hypotheses and theories, born of premature specialization in theories of reference, can be dismantled through a careful reconfiguration of the theoretical foundations long treated as untouchable, including much of the legacy of sacralized figures such as Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. Interestingly, the complex theory that emerged from this investigation bears no resemblance to the fragmentary, highly formal, and abstract approaches to which we have grown accustomed. Nor does it fit into familiar molds; rather, it approximates science, not through scientistic mimicry of method, but through plausibility, explanatory richness, internal coherence, and freedom from reductionist contrivances.

   It is impossible to explain this theory in any detail here, but I can offer a glimpse. It is grounded in rule‑based schemes for identifying proper names, which replace the traditional bundles of descriptions and prove extremely flexible in application. When properly associated with names, these schemes are completed by definite descriptions that transform them into rigid designators. This, in turn, dissolves the metaphysical contrast central to Kripke: the sharp distinction between proper names as rigid designators (referring to the same object in any possible world in which it exists) and definite descriptions as accidental or flaccid designators (which may refer to different objects in different possible worlds). For example, “the husband of Pythias” could, in some worlds, designate another person or no one at all, even if Aristotle himself existed there, unlike the proper name “Aristotle,” which consistently refers to that individual.[67]

   To give a concrete example, the name ‘Aristotle’ (or its equivalent) comes to be summarized by the following complex definite description, which serves as the expression of its identification rule:

 

THE person who satisfies (i) sufficiently and (ii) more than any other candidate, (iii) the locating condition of having been born in Stagira in 384 B.C., the son of the court physician, having traveled to Athens at the age of 17, and having studied with Plato for the next 20 years, etc., and/or the characterizing condition of having authored the Aristotelian corpus, etc.

 

This description-rule (presented here in condensed form) is itself a complex definite description, since it begins with ‘the’. Yet it is sufficiently flexible to identify Aristotle in any possible world in which he can be definitively given as existing, which makes the name “Aristotle” a rigid designator. Definite descriptions, by contrast, function as accidental designators only when tied to the identification rule of a proper name. This explains why definite descriptions that are not associated with any proper name can themselves become rigid designators. For example: “the rafflesia discovered by Dr. Joseph Arnold on May 20, 1818” is a definite description unlinked to any proper name; therefore, it applies to the same flower in every possible world in which it was discovered under those circumstances, making the description rigid. Other descriptions—such as “the tutor of Aristotle” or “the founder of the Lyceum”, are merely auxiliary. They are generally useful only insofar as most speakers, who lack sufficient knowledge to master the identification rule, can nonetheless insert the name correctly into discourse and, in this extended sense, “refer” to him through what P. F. Strawson called “borrowing of reference.”

   What distinguishes this theory in terms of scientific character is its operationality: if the identification rule for a proper name were implemented as a computer program, together with the data concerning the conditions of its application, one could reasonably expect the system to be capable of recognizing the bearer of the name. This would be impracticable for earlier theories, which relied on still precarious foundations derived from two opposing camps, led respectively by John Searle (descriptivist internalism, with an empiricist tendency) and Saul Kripke (causal-historical externalism, with a formalist tendency).

   Finally, the difference between formally oriented theories such as Kripke’s and my own may be compared to that between the digital computer, which operates with discrete elements, and the analog computer, which works with continuous quantities. Our brain is an analog computer, and so too, it seems, are its mechanisms of reference. Hence the necessity of introducing elements of indeterminacy that are inevitable in the referential act.

   As far as I know, my 2023 book has received no attention from specialists in the field, who are almost all externalists. I suppose this is because it did not (and, I guess, could not) emerge from the top-down hierarchy, which has long since become infertile and unhealthy. The De Gruyter editor, Christopher Shields, wrote to me that the American journal Notre Dame Philosophical Review (the most influential review journal) rarely reviews works published by the German press De Gruyter. I complained in a letter to the journal’s editor, sending him the original. He apologized and promised to forward the book to the editorial board. Naturally, nothing came of it, leaving me adrift – rather like Kafka’s character in The Castle, a situation not unfamiliar to me. Distrust? Corporatism? The maintenance of the status quo of the Anglo-American mainstream, formally oriented and politically constrained? Philosophical communities are exclusivist. One need only consult the bibliography of a history of philosophy written in Italian to see this: most quoted works are by Italian historians. Then, I find myself reflecting on the repressive effect of originality in countries culturally colonized, such as Brazil, which, in their best, merely import and mimic what comes from abroad... But that is beside the point. The fact remains that the Anglo-American critical society of ideas, like others, does not satisfy certain conditions of consensual legitimacy such as those of Merton and Habermas beyond its borders and, unfortunately, not even within them! Moreover, this case illustrates an effect that Susan Haack denounced: fragmentary philosophy, composed of theoretical conjectures that accumulate and multiply in increasingly scholastic discussions, becomes a barrier to the evaluation and acceptance of robust philosophical theories.

 

Against the claim that the core of analytic philosophy has fallen into stagnation, someone has objected to me that there are novelties, such as the logic of grounding, the knowledge-first approach, and enactivism, which are, after all, very significant acquisitions! Yet this is but another illusion, reminding us of Wittgenstein’s remark that a small age tends to see the world from its own tiny perspective. Let us see…

   It is true that the logic of grounding (ontological fundamentation) provides a more precise and refined instrument for clarifying themes already present in Plato, as the grounding of sensible reality in Ideas or Forms. Yet, while its contribution to logical inquiry is undeniable, it remains essentially a technical advance: a new tool available to philosophers rather than a philosophically disruptive innovation.

   The Knowledge-First approach originates in Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits, whose central thesis is that knowledge is a primitive, non-analyzable mental state: it entails belief, though belief does not entail knowledge. Moreover, knowledge constitutes evidence and is inherently “world-involving.” This means that, although it is a mental state, it is externalist in character, since it is necessarily connected to truth and thereby to the facts of the world.

   The Knowledge-First approach is motivated by the perceived failure of attempts to resolve Gettier’s challenge to the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief. In my view, however, this represents a profound confusion, better understood as an ingenious intellectual exercise than as genuine philosophical progress. Williamson’s sophistication is undeniable; yet his work often repackages familiar points (as in the anti-luminosity argument) or leans on long-standing confusions, such as the many strained efforts to rescue the traditional definition of knowledge from Gettierian counterexamples.

   In my view, Gettier’s celebrated argument against the traditional tripartite definition of knowledge as justified true belief is far less damaging than we are told. It appears to refute the traditional definition by presenting cases in which the believed proposition is true, there is a reasonable justification, but there is no knowledge. For example, I look at my watch and see that it reads noon.[68] The bells of the nearby church strike twelve. But then I recall that yesterday afternoon, my watch was running slow. I look again more carefully and realize that the watch is, in fact, stopped. It must have stopped at midnight the previous day… By mere coincidence, it shows the correct time. The traditional conditions of knowledge are satisfied: It is true that it is noon, I believed in it, and I had a reasonable justification for that claim, but now I see that they were insufficient. Another example is the barn case. Mary is driving in a rural area full of perfect fake barns posted there as scenery for a movie. Mary does not know that. She looks at the first barn and says, “What a beautiful red barn I am seeing there!” By chance, this is the only real barn in the area. What she says is true, she believes in it, and she has a good justification, since it looks precisely like a barn. However, since she identified the right barn only by chance, she does not really know that what she sees is a real barn.  But the condition of justified true belief is satisfied.

   I am convinced that Gettier’s problem was already solved by Robert Fogelin, and that his solution was strengthened by the author of the present text.[69] The genuine solution emerges from a more complex and refined dialogical reformulation of the traditional tripartite account. The key point is this: the justification offered by the speaker a for his knowledge of proposition p must be accepted as sufficient to render the proposition true by an evaluator b who possesses more complete information at the moment of his evaluation. The evaluator b can be a person who knows the region well and heard Mary’s utterance, and in the first example is myself some seconds after my first judgement. The more complete information reveals that the initially offered justification was insufficient to make p true. The solution, therefore, is to require that the justification given by a, for evaluator b of a’s knowledge-claim at the time of evaluation t, must be considered by b as sufficient to make p true. Formally, instead of

 

aKp = p & aCp & aJCp (the traditional tripartite definition),

 

 where K = knowledge, C = belief, and J = justification, what I proposed was:

 

aKp = (J & J ~> p) & aCp & (aJCp & J ∈ J*t),

 

where ‘t’ is the time of evaluation, J*t is the set {J,… Jn} of justifications individually accepted or acceptable by evaluator b at time t of his evaluation as being sufficient for the truth of p, and where ‘~>’ indicates that the justification on the left guarantees the truth of p with a probability equal to 1 (in the case of formal knowledge) or with a probability sufficiently close to 1 to allow the pretention of knowledge (in the case of empirical knowledge).

   This solution does not lead to relativism, insofar as we assume fairness in the dialogical situation, which can be achieved by satisfying conditions like (1) to (12) for an ideal speech situation.[70] This solution is closer to a pragmatic, Peircean approach: knowledge is what survives fair, informed evaluation over time. This solution arguably dissolves Gettier’s problem instead of solving it. Nonetheless, people continue discussing it as if the Gettier problem were a genuine hindrance. (For a less abridged exposition of my view, see Appendix I.)

   This isn’t the only case in which we find philosophical problems with straightforward solutions that remain unacknowledged by the philosophical community. The reason is simple: accepting them would mean the conversation could no longer be “kept going.”

   Another striking example is Wittgenstein’s sceptical puzzle about rule-following.[71] Suppose one wishes to teach a student the rule “add 2” in the sequence of natural numbers. At first, the student seems to have learned it correctly: when the teacher says 23, the student replies 25. But later, when the teacher says 1,000, the student answers 1,004; when the teacher says 1,003, the student answers 1,007. The student has misunderstood the rule, believing that after 1,000, one should add 4; after 10,000, add 8; and so on. Wittgenstein’s point is that, as it seems, there are infinitely many ways to misinterpret a rule.

   Kripke sharpened this paradox with his famous “quus” example: a student interprets the rule “plus” as a deviant operation that works like addition until the sum exceeds 57, at which point the answer is always 5.[72] Kripke’s book on this problem is notoriously intricate, replete with unsuccessful attempts to solve it, culminating in an obscure proposed solution.

  Yet the solution, which I attribute to Craig DeLancey (2004), is surprisingly easy.[73] Humans are biologically predisposed to interpret rules in the simplest possible way. By ‘simplicity’, DeLancey means computational economy: a Turing machine would require a longer, more complex program to generate the deviant interpretations imagined by Wittgenstein and Kripke than to generate the standard one. Even the normative force of the rules, the “oughtiness” to follow them, comes from our biological predispositions, insofar as they are socially reinforced by communal dispositions.

   Nevertheless, academic philosophers continue debating Kripke’s spider web, less out of genuine perplexity than out of deference to authority. After all, his treatment of Wittgenstein’s riddle provides endless material for discussion.[74] As Susan Haack wrote, quoting C. S. Peirce: “whom any discovery that brought quietus to a vexed question would evidently vex because it would end the fun of arguing around it and about it and over it”.[75] The resistance against a constructive solution isn’t because it is weak, but because most philosophers often prefer endlessly revisiting puzzles rather than accepting closure. In that sense, DeLancey’s view is less about “fixing” the definition and more about coming back to the epistemological game already played by philosophers from Plato to Hegel.

   Now, a word about epistemic externalism: in my view, it is either wrong or it is a misname, since closer scrutiny shows that externalism, defined as the view according to which justification depends on factors external to the subject’s awareness, does not only point to the world that externally to us caused the knowledge, which is an obviousness common to all views, but simply toward more nuanced forms of internalism. Consider, for example, reliabilism: the influential and doubtless important thesis that a belief qualifies as knowledge when it is produced by a process reliably conducive to truth. On this view, a third party, B, may ascertain that A knows that p insofar as A’s belief arises from a reliable cognitive mechanism, even if A has forgotten or never possessed reflective access to that mechanism. It is said that this differs from internalism because the latter requires that the subject be conscious of the justification. Examples include the process of seeing something under normal conditions, which is reliable, and the ordinary memory of recent facts, which is likewise reliable.

   Notwithstanding, it is sufficient to adopt a more refined and comprehensive conception of epistemic internalism, one in which the reliable process itself is internalized as a mental justificatory condition, even if completely unconscious. On this account, the justification that A possesses for knowing that B perceives an approaching car is that the event in question must generate A’s true belief that B visually apprehends the car’s approach. Such justification is internal, just as B’s reason for refraining from crossing the street, namely, his perceptual awareness of the oncoming vehicle, constitutes a reliable internal justification. The same analysis applies to memory: insofar as memory is a reliable cognitive process, the appeal to its past veridicality provides an internal justification, even though it is, as any knowledge of the external world, obviously grounded in external facts. Ordinary cases, in which the subject has either forgotten the justificatory basis or never explicitly possessed it, likewise demand internalist interpretation. A person may know how to compute a square root without recalling when or how she acquired the procedure; she knows that she knows because she remembers having successfully employed the method on previous occasions, thereby rendering it reliable and internally justified. A well-known illustration of externalism is the case of chick sexers who are able to determine the sex of newly hatched chicks merely by looking at and handling them. Suppose they cannot even explain how they succeed in identifying the sex, though the procedure proves correct in the vast majority of cases.[76]  Here we have well known example of a practice justified by its reliability. Properly considered, chick sexers would, in the example, have a sound justification for claiming that they know the probable sex of a chick, even if they cannot articulate the basis of their judgment. The justification is straightforward: the procedure generally works; hence, it is reliable; hence, they have a justification. However, such justification is obviously internal, even if it derives from the experience of an external regularity.

    Descending now to the animal realm, one may attribute knowledge to a dog who anticipates its owner’s arrival at dusk and runs to the door. Although the animal cannot articulate a justification, we ascribe knowledge on the basis of its repeated experiential correlation between dusk and the owner’s return. In this sense, we justify the attribution by recognizing that the dog possesses an internal justification of which it lacks any possible conscious awareness. The animal has no cognitive means to extract a reliable justification for its Pavlovian passive conditioning, but we say the dog “knows” his owner is coming. Would we say the same about a case of active conditioning like that of a pigeon that learned to peck a green button in order to gain a corn kernel? Surely, the pigeon “knows”, and it knows because a non-conscious reliable process occurs in the pigeons’ mind, as small as it may be. The real difference is that this is clearly a case of learned knowing how and not of any propositional knowing that.

   In any conceivable way, as properly understood, reliabilism always collapses into one or another form of internalism, which means that the term ‘external’ is gratuitous, serving only to create the impression of a discovery that never in fact occurred. The dispute turns out to be merely verbal. If the reliabilist agrees with me on this point, then all that remains is to dispense with a terminology that suggests the discovery of something essentially different from internal justification.[77] Moreover, from the fact that the roots of knowledge are external, it does not follow that knowledge, as such, must possess any external, non-mental component. This would be a genetic fallacy, which applies even more forcefully to semantic externalism.[78]

   Consider now the case of enactivism. According to this view, cognition is not computation, but embodied action.[79] The mind is not merely the passive reception of information, but the “bringing forth” (the enacting) of a world through the bodily interaction with the environment. Because of this, the mind cannot be explained by a computational model, since computers do not have bodies. Thus, for example, seeing isn’t merely the processing of visual inputs but an active skill involving movements such as turning the head, adjusting focus, and interacting with the environment. The role of mental representation, on the other hand, is downplayed. In its most radical form, enactivism permits cognition without representation.[80] For instance, the amoeba moves towards its nutrients, and the newborn closes its hands when something touches their palms.

   In my view, this calls for a Wittgensteinian therapy, since the originality of the enactivist account rests on improper extensions of words such as ‘cognition’ and ‘mind’ far beyond their established usage. It is obvious that computational models alone cannot explain the workings of the mind; it is equally obvious that the mind requires a living body to interact with the external environment, and that this interaction is essential. But none of this entails that the body is an extension of the mind.

   To correct the examples: seeing is a process internal to the brain and the mind. It depends on sensory-motor actions—turning the head, adjusting focus—that belong to the body, not to the brain or the mind. An amoeba moves toward nutrients without representation, cognition, or mind. The apprehension reflex of the newborn occurs without representation, but also without cognition.

   The dream of a practicing Buddhist such as Francisco Varela – the person who introduced the notion of enactivism – would be that the mind extends to the body and beyond to the world (as nirvana approaches). Unfortunately, reality is harsher than we would like to admit. As T. S. Eliot wrote: “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.[81]  

   In contrast, Jean Piaget, an old-fashioned serious researcher, investigated the sensorimotor stage in children from birth to two years of age without compromise. He did not embrace the option of diminishing or rejecting the role of symbolic representation. On the contrary, his research traced the progressive development of cognitive reasoning in children, culminating in the formal operational stage at age eleven and beyond.

Escapism, understood as the tendency to avoid reality through argumentative fantasy, is a common trend in contemporary philosophy.[82] A prominent example of this strategy, akin to enactivism, is the “extended mind,” which many enactivist embrace warmly. According to this view, the mind is not confined to what occurs within the brain.

   Consider the following case: Person A remembers the date of a concert. Person B, who has a poor memory, writes the same date in a notebook. On the basis of this information, both A and B attend the concert. The extended‑mind theorist concludes (1) that what is written in B’s notebook constitutes part of B’s belief, in the same way that A’s memory does. From this, they derive the corollary (2): the notebook containing the date is a part of B’s mind, albeit located outside B’s body.

   The problem is that recognizing the mind’s capacity to make use of external resources – from the calculator to artificial intelligence – which can assist it and even exponentially expand its possibilities, is not the same as claiming that these external resources constitute part of the mind. However, the concept of mind was always understood as the seat of thought, awareness, and feeling, and was subsequently extended to include memory, attention, and intellectual capacity, while excluding notebooks, calculators, and AI. The impression of a “discovery” here arises from a misuse of language: a primitive anthropomorphic projection that recalls the Paleolithic belief that plants contained spirits. To yield to such a temptation in our own time, however, is an intellectually immature attitude.[83]

 

None of this compels me to disagree with Haack’s message in its essence. The current academic philosophy – fragmented[84] and hand-to-mouth – far from making people more critical, instead restricts and stupefies them.

   The final diagnosis is one of decline or, as Haack prefers, of a genuine “intellectual disaster” whose roots lie in the disappearance of profound philosophical innovation within universities that hold hegemony over scientific and cultural production. Yet it remains legitimate to hope that philosophy – by its very nature, almost inevitably disruptive – may rise again, like the phoenix from its ashes. (Without forgetting, of course, that for this to occur, the phoenix must first be consumed by its own fire.)

   Haack identified well the proximate causes of this decline – the more remote causes, I believe, are of another order. She observed that, prior to the Second World War, there was spare space in philosophical journals for publications. An ethic prevailed according to which one should publish only when having something important to say. The ideology of publish or perish, now multiplied by the Internet, radically altered this landscape, virtually paralyzing the possibility of the unexpected – something that transcends the almost automated evaluation of editors constrained by the pressure for innovation and their own hyperspecialized reviewers. (What editor today would accept to publish a book in the style of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? Who would have the intellect of Gilbert Ryle as the editor of Mind?) Alongside this, Haack observed symptoms of intellectual corruption, such as the publication of “salami articles” (papers sliced into minimal units and often co‑authored by multiple writers), and the emergence of perverse incentives, exemplified by the absurd “philosophy olympiads.” She also noted that the contemporary American university is increasingly managed by CEOs, who must demonstrate results and compel universal engagement with research. To this I would add the recycling of ideas: arguments presented thirdly or more years ago are presented again, in somewhat different language and context, probably even without the author’s awareness. In this atmosphere, philosophy has come to be treated as if it were or should be a progressive science – or worse, as if it were a semi-technical investigation in constant development: everyone is expected to be a philosopher and to produce innovations, forgetting that the learning of philosophy is a cumulative process that can demand decades to reach maturity.[85] Plato already knew that, as he demanded that philosopher candidates should first learn sciences and arts, and even live the life of common people, until they were about fifty years old, when they could already be good philosophers (Republic 521c-540a). He also criticized young people doing philosophy, since they lack maturity and stability of character (Republic 485a-487a).

   Yet where everyone is required to be a philosopher, no one can truly be a philosopher. Philosophy, in its highest sense, demands intellectual commitment, time for creative leisure, a broad and diversified scientific and humanistic culture, the long acquisition of knowledge through projects that may require many years of reflection, and, in addition, some kind of talent. A system that demands constant productivity in shared projects renders this ideal unattainable. The result is a minimalist persiflage of genuine philosophical labor—something that anyone can perform without significant preparation.

   It is as if all who study music were obliged to compose, or as if all who learn painting were required to be painters. Such demands are possible, of course, but only at the expense of quality. Beethoven and Michelangelo were not merely individuals of exceptional talent (though many may possess the same potential) but, above all, they were consciously and wholly committed to an ideal of aesthetic greatness and perfection,[86] sustained by an environment conducive to their flourishing. In some measure, the same holds true for Plato and Aristotle, or Kant and Hegel – figures whose philosophical achievement was inseparable from such commitment and context. Increasingly, this dimension is lacking in our excessively technocratic world.

   It may be worth recalling what befell philosophy and also Austrian and German science after the Second World War. Although Paris was the center of the arts in the first half of the twentieth century, Vienna was the heart of science and culture more broadly, particularly through the University of Vienna. With the rise of Nazism, its best scientists – many of them Jewish – were forced into exile. Freud, a native of Vienna, sought refuge in England; Karl Popper in New Zealand; and most members of the Vienna Circle in the United States. Kurt Gödel, the mathematical genius who formulated the incompleteness theorems, though not himself Jewish, was closely connected to Jewish intellectuals and, in 1939, was assaulted by young Nazis in the center of Vienna. His wife, Adele, saved him with remarkable courage, armed only with an umbrella, and it is not unlikely that, thanks to her, he, who was not very clever about the ways of the world, managed to reach Princeton in time, where he joined Albert Einstein. So was the University of Vienna emptied of its talents.

   Curious, however, is what happened afterward. Following the war, none of them were invited to return to Vienna. Those who replaced them, out of a mixture of vanity, envy, and fear of exposing their own mediocrity, did not wish to live once more in the shadow of far more talented figures. The few who dared to return, such as the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger, were received coldly by the academic community. The result was devastating: deprived of its leading minds, the University of Vienna never regained its former level. A similar decline occurred across German‑speaking universities. It is also striking that the two best German philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, Habermas and Tugendhat, were born and spent their childhoods before the war, in a cultural climate profoundly different from what followed.

   These examples reveal that the culture which shapes human consciousness is fragile – difficult to bring forth and even more difficult to preserve. If the university’s hierarchical structure does not renew itself creatively, it ceases to be a living source of cultural innovation.[87] And if this holds true for the sciences, it applies all the more to so suspect an activity as philosophy, whose task is the cultivation of critical intellect and which often must assume the role of questioning the unquestionable.

 

Since criticism of present philosophy is a delicate matter that does not fall within the central aim of the present text, I shall not dwell on it. I merely recall Harry Frankfurt’s brief study of the phenomenon he termed bullshit, understood as intellectual constructions that are at times extraordinarily complex and sophisticated, yet produced without any commitment to truth. This phenomenon, he writes, is a collateral effect of the broadening of access to culture, which has given rise to an ever-growing number of individuals who, though cultivated, have nothing of real relevance to say.[88]

   Obviously, I am not suggesting that the present stagnation of Anglophone analytic philosophy – virtually the only surviving strand – stems from bad faith or from the frivolity of mere manufacturers of bullshit. The explanation is more profound. It is more accurate to think that a social group distorted by a system is thereby led into unconsciousness of its own distortions, which may result in individuals doing unproductive work without the slightest awareness of that.

   Freud conducted a study on the phenomenon of religious belief, which he regarded as a collective repetition-neurosis.[89] He noted that silly rites and implausible stories, when shared by many, acquire strength as though by collective hypnosis. In truth, any mass movement is subject to a kind of collective blindness. As Hannah Arendt observed, Adolf Eichmann bore no personal animosity toward the Jews. Yet he was part of a system and saw it as his duty, as a public official, to carry out with maximum efficiency the order to organize the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps.[90]

   Consider, for example, the contemporary philosophical community's priority to complexity over plausibility. Even Kant had already observed that this priority is misguided. Yet no one seems to notice. Moreover, this is a story of decline that began in the citadel's most distinguished quarters, for decadence always begins at the top. So, no one of comparable stature has taken the place of Searle, Kripke, Dummett, or Habermas. But here we encounter another problem: what, precisely, is the decadence of a culture? How does it occur? And why?

   A case of philosophical cultural decline was described in an unparalleled way by Edward Gibbon in his history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire:

The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to the next, thwarted any generous attempt to exercise the powers or expand the boundaries of the human mind. The masterpieces of poets and orators, instead of igniting inspiration on their own, gave rise only to cold and servile imitations. The very name of “poet” had been almost forgotten; that of “orator” was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, compilers, and commentators darkened the face of knowledge, and soon, the decline of genius was followed by the corruption of taste.[91]

 

The decline of analytical philosophy has occurred in a similar way and with similar consequences, though disguised as it were a form of progress.

   To describe the phases of decline, I will appeal to the vague concept of ‘level’, which designates breath, depth, and abstraction, often capable of creating new theoretical frameworks. (In this sense, A. J. Ayer considered himself a second-order philosopher if compared with Russell and Wittgenstein). Here is how I believe its mechanism can be described in terms of a successive lowering of philosophical standards:

 

 Phase 1: At the outset, there emerged philosophers of the highest order, the founding fathers of analytic philosophy: Frege and Wittgenstein, the two only geniuses at the summit, followed by Russell – people who were sufficiently intelligent to engage in dialogue with Leibniz. They belonged to a world apart, one still profoundly hierarchical and elitist (in both its most admirable and its most problematic aspects). It was the European world, marked by deep sociocultural fissures both internal and external, which, through its colonial rivalries, was driven into the two World Wars. These very contradictions provided the ferment for the great cultural achievements that defined the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Phase 2: In the subsequent stage, philosophers of the second rank emerged. Doubtless, they were extraordinary theorists such as J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson at Oxford, alongside the Vienna Circle positivists, notably Rudolf Carnap, and, in England, A. J. Ayer. Their contributions were significant, yet they also tended to dismiss the intellectual legacy of the founding fathers. One example is Strawson’s not fully convincing criticism of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions. However, in my view, the most formidable misstep lay in their rejection of Wittgenstein’s semantic principle of verification, a critique directed at what they ultimately failed to grasp in its entirety. Nevertheless, this rejection has been transmitted to the present as “inherited wisdom” (see Chapter VII, Section 4).

 

Phase 3: Afterward was the turn of the American analytical philosophers, influenced by the logical positivists who had emigrated to the United States, fleeing from nazism, such as Carnap himself. Their intentions were less noble and more “pragmatic.” They felt compelled to challenge their European benefactors, devising intelligent and imaginative strategies to confront the “inherited wisdom” and to establish new theories, as brilliant as intuitively implausible. To this end, they inevitably adopted the strategy of divide and conquer, relying largely on creative challenges in the style of Hume, albeit of far lesser quality.[92] Figures such as W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson appeared, later followed by the restrictive genius of Saul Kripke, by Hilary Putnam, David Kaplan, and many others – all of them scientistic philosophers of the second or third rank, not due to any lack of capacity or imagination, but rather because of the inevitably reductionist character of the formalist orientation that constitutes their argumentative procedures (see Chapter III). The danger inherent in this “Humean” procedure of challenging inherited wisdom through new and more questionable doctrines lies in the loss of consilience; in doing so, the philosopher risks sawing off the very branch upon which he sits.

   Although with relevant insights, like Kripke’s distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators, the pathognomonic mark of error in this context lay in the profoundly counterintuitive character of their challenges, whose justification could not withstand, in its entirety, a proper critique of language. Hence their fixation on syntax and on a simplified semantics, with the near exclusion of pragmatics (Ch. II, sec. 3). A philosopher of pragmatic orientation, such as the later Wittgenstein, with his “linguistic therapy,” was therefore anathematized – and continues to be so even today. Indeed, the dreamed triumph was to analyze ordinary concepts as though they belonged to quantum physics. This is not to say that they lacked perspicacity. After all, even John Searle and Ernst Tugendhat, isolated defenders of older ideas, were not prepared to effectively refute Kripke and Putnam (a task that fell solely to me).

   With the institutional acceptance of the ideas of the Phase 3 philosophers, a new “inherited wisdom” of somewhat inferior level was established, encouraging somewhat gratuitous inventiveness. I refer not only to the rejection of verificationism, but also to theses such as the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference (Quine), the rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction (Quine), inventions such as the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori (Kripke), the referential function of the external causal-historical chain (Kripke), semantic externalism (Putnam), an externalist challenge to Frege’s view of indexicals (Perry), the elimination of the tripartite definition of knowledge on the basis of the Gettier problem (Lehrer, Nozick), together with the epistemic externalism (Goldman), and in philosophy of science, the thesis thar electrons and quarks are non-real constructions of our minds (Bas Van Fraassen). There are important half-truths within these errors, which contribute to the persistence of confusion.

 

Phase 4: In the attempt to astonish by overturning not only common sense but also sound reason, the process was carried forward by the heirs of the Phase 3 group, accumulating new “inherited wisdoms” until reaching the level of the indefensible – that is, preposterous confusions such as knowledge-first (Williamson), childlike sugestions such as the extended mind argument (Chalmers), or ignoble arguments such as the claim that, since meaning lies outside the head, as Putnam demonstrated, and since the locus of meaning is the mind, then the mind itself must also lie outside the head (McDowell),[93] culminating in absurdities such as dialetheism, according to which, if certain propositions fail to be either true or false, it is because they are both true and false at the same time (Priest).[94]

   By casting forth these challenges from the lofty heights of their podiums, with no critics left to confront them, these latter-day philosophers eliminate most of the foundations upon which any deeper reflection might have been constructed, thereby undermining the integrative force that only consilience could engender. In so doing, they opened an immense space for generally unfounded, superficial, and unrestrained niche speculation, often taking refuge in hermetic formalistic elaborations ever more remote from anything that might rightly be called philosophically significant.

 

Phase 5: Assuming the process continues, it is easy to foresee the future fate of anglophonic philosophy. Having the philosophers already severed all the main branches upon which they once sat, their cascading fall from the tree of wisdom will be inevitable. Philosophers of the third, fourth, and indeed of any conceivable rank will be bound to proliferate in multitudes. Within this apocryphal milieu, any invention, no matter how shallow, will be readily accepted, provided it conforms to the standards established by the accumulation of more and more deceptive “inherited wisdoms,” fitting neatly into one of the many niches of technically admissible “funny hypotheses.” After all, just as nothing useful can be produced upon false foundations, so too from them everything may follow (ex falso quodlibet). In this way, philosophy will finally become democratic: “one philosopher, one vote” – a glass-bead game, accessible to any sufficiently unconscious and uncommitted inhabitants of a wasteland of self-indulgence.[95]

   The irrelevance of the game, though unnoticed internally, will be readily perceived from the outside by any minimally lucid observer. Those who possess sufficient discernment and preserved intellectual integrity not to be deceived will keep their distance. Thus, if the process continues, what will remain at the forefront of creativity will be those impervious in their disconnection from reality, albeit endowed with imagination and computational capacity, an attribute that must not be confused with intelligence, here understood as the “capacity to apprehend truth.”[96] In this way, Analytic philosophy will be transformed into a Tower of Babel of innumerable tongues: a headless turkey spinning around aimlessly.

 

Let us now cast a glance at the more distant causes of decline. In the search for explanation, we may recall what Max Weber foresaw as the possible outcome of the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt). In his account, the world was once perceived as infused with magic and largely governed by religious institutions. Over time, however, it was progressively demystified, especially with the rise of capitalism, which either changed the role of those institutions to foster it through the Protestant ethic or eroded that role, often through nihilism. Disenchantment goes hand in hand with the bureaucratization, rationalization, and desacralization of human life. Although Weber acknowledged both the inevitability and advantages of this process, he also regarded it negatively, as a loss of communal bonds. Human beings, trapped in the “iron cage” of bureaucratization, become mere cogs in a vast machinery: small cogs whose greatest ambition is to become larger ones. At the end of the process, those who are intellectual cogs turn into “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, nulities that imagine themselves to have attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”[97]

   In this light, analytic philosophy may be seen as imprisoned within callous bureaucratic institutions whose hierarchical rigidity inhibits upheaval and fosters harmless fragmentation into countless micro‑philosophical theories. Such proliferation obscures the very face of knowledge, for great philosophical problems cannot be resolved through small solutions.

   Yet disenchantment alone may not suffice to explain the confinement of culture and philosophy within an iron cage. Philosophers influenced by Marxism, such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse[98], would add to Weber’s account the phenomenon of the culture industry of later capitalismo. The system was designed to keep individuals distracted and passive, alienating them from their human essence so they might better serve the machinery of late capitalism.[99] Moreover, they would easily argue that the culture industry has penetrated universities, estranging researchers from modes of thought with genuine critical potential, modes that could challenge the narrow techno‑scientific utility now demanded. Natural scientists are exposed to scientistic philosophizing that suggests nothing exists beyond their restricted universe, while scholars in the human sciences, philosophers included, are encouraged to amuse themselves with “funny hypotheses” of a micro‑philosophical nature, leaving them alienated from any form of totalizing, potentially critical thought. Moreover, the conditions for authentic consensus are constrained by a closed intellectual hierarchy that excludes potentially dissonant voices.

   The historian Jacques Barzun suggested that we are living at the end of a civilizational arc that began with the Renaissance.[100] It seems plausible. Furthermore, this end is coming together with the end of the Pax Americana that began after the Second World War, which is also the end of the illusion of liberal democratic capitalism, for the better, though what comes next is, for now, terra incognita.[101]

   Must the future of our philosophy culminate in a kind of High Middle Ages, as did the Roman decline described by Gibbon? Or, as “the polar night of icy darkness”[102] described by Max Weber? Not necessarily. History shows that dusk is followed by night, but night is followed by dawn. Weber himself believed that society ultimately holds the key to opening the iron cage of rationalization and bureaucratization imposed within capitalist Society, perhaps, according to him, through “a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.”[103] Consequently, the present lack of disruptive innovations in philosophy need not be regarded as an irreversible fate.

 

In the second part of her article, Susan Haack proposed an alternative path that I have, in fact, been attempting to follow. She emphasized the importance of a sufficiently comprehensive treatment of problems and of a procedure by successive approximations[104] guided by the assumption of consilience. Instead of dividing in order to conquer, one should try conquer a reasonably broad issue so as not to need to divide in arbitrary ways. As Wittgenstein once observed to himself:

 

Do not get involved in partial problems, but always take flight toward where there is a free view of the whole, of the great single problem, even if that vision is not yet clear.[105]

 

We can compare this procedure to the art of painting: it begins with the conception as a whole, a vague display of shapes, colors, light, and shadows... Gradually, the forms are outlined with greater precision, errors are detected and corrected, details and shades are added, and what at first seemed like incomprehensible smudges is transformed into clear, convincing, and truly beautiful images. They may be oil paintings, collages, frescoes... Habermas’s work, for example, seems to me comparable to a series of large panels with some moments of great density, such as that of his universal pragmatics.

   Yet to work with philosophy in this way requires the right atmosphere, and that atmosphere is not given to us. As Jacques Barzun argued, we live in a period of cultural decline and exhaustion, in which complex problems are treated as if they were simple. This tendency extends easily to our present hand-to-mouth philosophy, which, as a rule, lacks the patience and depth that genuine thought demands.

   A common explanation for philosophy’s contemporary difficulties is the claim that the exponential growth of knowledge has rendered its traditional trajectory impossible. Yet this can be doubted. What has advanced exponentially is not so much science itself as applied science and technology. And who can say whether a social crisis, profound enough to be salutar, combined with AI and other technological innovations, might not restore high culture from its current disgrace? After all, Hegel, writing in an age of intense political and religious conflict, once observed: “The necessity of philosophy can only arise in times of crisis, when the power of unification has vanished from human life and oppositions, having lost their living resemblance and reciprocal reaction, become independent.”[106]

 

 

---

[1] From the “Warning Note” appeared after Bertrand Russell’s intellectual autobiography entitled My Philosophical Development.

[2] “Now when we consider the whole, such and such a form realized in this flesh and these bones, so that this is Callias or Socrates—they differ by virtue of their matter (for matter is different in different individuals), but they are the same in form; for the form is indivisible.” Metaphysics 1034a 5–8 (my italics). Now, if the form is indivisible, it must be capable of participating in a diversity of substances, which seems unreasonable for Aristoteles. For an exposition of Aristotle’s Platonic relapses, see W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. V, chap. XIII. See also A. E. Taylor, Aristotle.

[3] A. Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, cap. 1, p. 4.

[4] J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, p. 232.

[5] The book entitled How to do Things with Words was posthumously published in 1962.

[6] Philosophische Untersuchungen, I, sec. 126.

[7] See Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, Oevres, vol. I. "I do not follow his classification in detail, since he committed at least two obvious errors: the inclusion of astronomy (an applied science) among the sciences I call basic, and the exclusion of psychology, which was still practically nonexistent as a science in his time. The principles of classification, however, remain valid.

 

[8] It should be noted that ‘sociology’ is better understood in a broad sense, as conceived by Durkheim, for whom it encompassed political economy, demography, the history of law, the history of religions, and related fields.

[9] I use this expression instead of ‘epistemic rupture’ since the latter is usually understood as a rupture occurring inside and not at the beginning of a science.

[10] J. R. Searle noted that it is a mistake to believe that, because objects of internal experience have an ontologically subjective mode of existence, they must also be epistemically subjective, preventing their access by science. Examples: pain, pleasure, visual experiences, beliefs, intentions... are ontologically subjective phenomena, but epistemically objective. See his Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, pp. 43-45.

 

[11] Fragment 2, Diels-Kranz 28 B2.

[12] Aristotle, Metaphysics 1005b 19 ss.

[13]  Aristotle, Physics, Book VI, 2.

[14] G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven & M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 133-134. See discussion in W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, p. 103.

[15] Karl Popper, “Back to the Pre-Socratics”, in his book, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 138.

 

[16] Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, vol. I, p. 25.

[17] The first to develop this hypothesis, now discredited among cosmologists, was R. C. Tolman in his classic Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology, sec. 174, p. 439 (1934). Tolman’s suggestion is now questioned, and other, even more ambitious and equally hypothetical ideas have emerged, such as the Big Bang caused by the collision between three-dimensional membranes.

[18] G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven & M. Schonfield (eds.), The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 140-142.

[19] See Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, vol. I, pp. 22-23. In reference to Darwin’s salutation, Kenny directs the reader to the appendix of the sixth edition of The Origin of Species.

[20] Plato, Republic, IV, 446a ss.

[21] Plato, Phaedrus 246a ss.

[22] Paul D. McLean: The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions.

[23] Consider, for instance, Jeremy Genovese’s influential critical article, “Snakes and Ladders: A Reappraisal of the Triune Brain Hypothesis.” According to him, brain evolution should be seen as adaptive, mosaic, and context-dependent, and not layered, as in McLean’s theory. But why not a dual framework? One about ranking, the other about process? If not, we should ask whether Genovese's anti-antropomorphic argument isn’t, to a certain extent, conflating ecological success with neural sophistication. For if he is right, the insect nervous system should be more developed than that of the homo neanderthalensis, since it has demonstrated greater adaptive success.

[24] S. Freud, The Ego and the Id.

[25]  Tha is, in that which in his Physics was not metaphysics, and also in On the Heavens.

[26] Aquinas on Mind, pp. 4-5.

[27] For Kant, a priori knowledge is that which is independent of sensory experience, as well as necessary and universal. Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Einführung. B 1-3.

[28] Como é sabido, a existência de Deus, da Alma e da liberdade foi para Kant, postulada pela razão prática, ainda que não pudesse sê-lo pela razão pura. Para ele a moralidade dependia da aceitação desses postulados. (Ver a segunda parte da Crítica da Razão Prática.) Sobre essa mudança Russell notou sarcasticamente que, embora Kant tenha sido acordado de seu sono dogmático por David Hume, ele logo descobriu um sonífero que lhe permitisse dormir outra vez, acrescentando que a maioria das pessoas nunca consegue se libertar das verdades auridas no ventre materno. Cf Bertrand Russell: A History of Western Philosophy.

[29] This is a reference, not to the ambitious common sense that contradicts science (such as “The sun revolves around the earth” or “time is always the same for any observer”), but to the everyday common sense, which is presupposed even for our learning of science, such as “my body exists,” “There are other human beings,” or “The earth has existed for a long time.” It is continuous with science, which would be impossible if we rejected its presuppositions. D. M. Armstrong called it “moorean common sense”, in deference to G. E. Moore’s article, “A Defense of Common Sense.” See Claudio Costa, Philosophical Semantics: Reintegrating Theoretical Philosophy, cap. II. See also Susan Haack, “The Long Arm of Common Sense”.

[30] Keith Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge. See also William James, Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 23.

[31] Aquinas on Mind, p. 5.

[32] Aquinas on Mind, p. 9. I agree with Kenny’s motivation, but not with his conclusion. My aim is to show that the belief that the progressist thesis endangers the scope of philosophy confuses the nature of scientific answers (i.e., answers consensually attainable) that may eventually replace the central problems of philosophy – which are questions whose ultimate nature we do not know – with the undertakings of already existing particular sciences, such as physics, whose nature we already know.

[33] Friedrich Nietzsche set forth demystifying insights on this question in Human, All Too Human, cap. IV, sec. 165.

[34] Walter Isaacson, Einstein, His Life and Universe, p. 122.

[35] See J. Passmore, “Philosophy”, in Paul Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. VI, pp. 219-20.

 

[36] The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Part I, Chap. I, 6.

[37] See K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 339–340. The standard example of decisive falsification employed by Popper was the deflection of starlight observed during the 1919 eclipse. Ironically, precisely this test would later be considered too unreliable to be probative. (Cf. Martin Gardner, Relativity Explained, Appendix, pp. 96-7).

[38] See K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Inquiry, cap. II.

 

[39] “What is Science?”, p. 42 (my italics). Science, as a corpus of knowledge, as what scientists do, and as an institution, wrote Ziman, “cannot be treated separately, any more than a solid can be reconstructed from its projection onto different Cartesian planes.” (ibid. p. 42).

[40] John Ziman, Public Knowledge, p. 24

[41] The Sociology of Science, cap. 13, p. 267 ss.

[42] The sociology of science, p. 270.

[43] “Wahrheitstheorien” (1972). See also Truth and Justification.   

[44] Some philosophers of science downplay the role of truth in science. Bas van Fraassen (as an anti-realist), for instance, replaces the truth of a theory with its empirical adequacy as the acceptance of truth regarding observables and not the ultimate truth. But one can believe to know the truth of inobservables (as a realist) without commitment to any ultimate truth, as if empirical adequacy were nothing more than the acceptance of truth by scientists involved in a research program. See his The Scientific Image, p. 12.

[45]  There are explainable exceptions, such as Nietzsche. Perhaps the most curious was Wittgenstein, who knew almost nothing from history of philosophy but had excellent ears and practically ran the weekly lectures at Cambridge, where the best of analytical philosophy gathered. With one foot in the university and the other in the world of life, which he experienced in depth, he easily perceived the academic longing to go far beyond the limits of natural language and the idleness of their attempts, hence inventing his "therapeutic philosophy”. However, although Nietzsche and Wittgenstein didn’t mastered a tradition, they founded new philosophical ways to see tradition.

[46] Scientificism as the result of overconfidence in formalisms can be found, for instance, in Scott Soames’ book, Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism. Overconfidence in empirical science leading to reductionism can be exemplified in Sam Harris’s popular book Free Will, which explicitly defends the view that Libet’s findings show our sense of conscious choice is illusory.

[47] Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith, “What is Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?”, p. 4. See also Dennett, “High-Order Truths about Schmess”

[48] Ver Susan Haack “The Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to its Reintegration.”

[49] “Afterword: Must do Better”, in The Philosophy of Philosophy, pp. 249-280.

[50] Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

[51] Susan Haack: “The Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to its Reintegration”, in The Fragmentation of Philosophy, p. 15. Em seu uso do conceito de consiliência, Haack foi influenciada pelo trabalho do biólogo Edward Wilson.

[52] Form, Matter, Substance.

[53] Continental philosophy, or what remains of it, has likewise been in decline. Consider the case of three of its current exponents, such as Slavoj Žižek, Markus Gabriel, and Quentin Meillassoux. Žižek, influenced by Hegel, Marx, and Jacques Lacan, has advanced an imaginative and socially relevant critique. Yet his theoretical approach becomes “Lacanian” in the sense that it remains entangled in expressive conceptual entanglements without overcoming them. (As one critic observed, “intelligent enough to formulate incisive critiques, but not sufficiently so to construct a consistent theory”.) Markus Gabriel, in turn, draws upon a wide range of historical and contemporary texts, which he remasters in order to produce “pseudo-thaumas” – effects of wonder – in a juvenile public, more impressionable than demanding. Meillassoux, finally, elaborates elegant intellectual fantasies that, at bottom, continue the postmodernist tradition. His intricate provocations, when closely examined, appear far removed from the profound originality of Hume, the philosopher upon whom he relies. Originality is truly explosive only when combined with relevance.

[54] Jenny Teichman, “Don’t be Cruel or Reasonable”, in Polemical Papers, p. 134. D. W. Hamlyn: Uma história da filosofia ocidental, p. 398. (O original em inglês foi publicado em 1987.)

[55] Susan Haack, “Scientistic Philosophy: No; Scientific Philosophy: Yes.”

[56] Susan Haack. “Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to Reintegration”, in Reintegrating Philosophy, cap. 1, p. 9.

[57] Susan Haack, “Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to Reintegration”, in Reintegration of Philosophy, cap. 1, 1.3. See also Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith, “What is Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy”. A defense of fragmentation as inevitable was presented by Scott Soames in The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, vol. 3, Appendix.

[58] Susan Haack, “Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to Reintegration”.

[59] As Jenny Teichman noted, “British and American philosophy has recengly become extraordinarily scholastic, obsessed with questions about how many philosophers can sito n a niggle”, p. 134.

[60] Blue book, p. 18 (1933-1934)

[61] Susan Haack, “The Fragmentation of Philosophy; the Road to its Reintegration, p. 20.

[62] Susan Haack, “Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to Reintegration”, p. 21. It is curious to note that metaphilosophers belonging to the current mainstream, such as Timothy Williamson (2022), or the authors of An Introduction to Metaphilosophy (2013), do not cite the well-researched and controversial metaphilosophical texts of Susan Haack. I assume they lack good counterarguments.

[63] See Susan Haack, “Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to Reintegration”, in Reintegration of Philosophy, pp. 5-14.

[64] For instance, the book Marx, from James Edwards and Brian Leiter (2025), and Leibniz, from Nicholas Jolley (2005), which I have the pleasure of reading.

[65] Claude Panaccio, Ockham’s Nominalism (1923).

[66] See Form, Matter, Substance (2023).

[67] There are possible worlds in which someone else married Pythias, but there cannot be a possible world in which Aristotle is not the referent of ‘Aristotle’.

[68]  This example was first presented by Bertrand Russell, who saw in it only a bad justification, and not a challenge to the tripartite definition.

[69] I perceived the obvious solution as soon as I learned the problem. But I considered it too obvious not to have been noticed before, so I went on to investigate the historical responses to the problem. The most elaborate one I found is in Fogelin’s book. What remained for me was to refine and formalize his solution. After my article was published in Ratio (2010), I sent it to Fogelin, who believed that this version had strengthened what he himself thought… See Chapter V of my book Lines of Thought.

[70] Here one could object that my conception of knowledge is contextualist: what assures knowledge is what we know now and better. Indeed, there is no absolute knowledge and truth, but we can compare pretensions of knowledge and truth.

[71]  Philosophical Investigations I, sec. 201.

[72] Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p. 9

[73] “Simplicity and the Skeptical Challenge to Meaning”.

[74] I discussed the case in my book, The Philosophical Semantics, pp. 346-349.

[75] Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, p. 188.

[76] In fact, they usually do know! It’s about finding a small protrusion that males generally have in the cloaca, as well as slight differences in the colour and length of the feathers.

[77] If reliabilism is understood as the possession of information that renders an internal justification reliable, whether in the first or even in the third person, then it should be regarded as a significant addition to the traditional definition, which requires justification for the proposition that is known.

[78] For an explanation of why Putnam’s semantic externalism does not work, see Claudio Ferreira-Costa, How Do Proper Names Really Work?, pp.228-236.

[79] Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, p. 213. This is the grounding book on enactivism, published in 1991.

[80] Daniel Hutto & Erik Myin, in Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content (2014).

[81] T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”, p. 172. Sigmund Freud would speak of lack of principle of reality.

[82] The idea of the extended mind was formally introduced in the article “The Extended Mind” (1998) by Andy Clark and David Chalmers.

[83] The strategy of reasoning can be extended to the laughable: “if the intestine has the function of digesting aliments, then preparing food also belongs to the intestine.” “If the dialysis machine cleans the blood, then it is a real kidney.”  

[84] As Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith have already observed, the principal divisions of philosophy are: analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and the history of philosophy. The difficulty is that these domains do not communicate with one another, which proves limiting for innovative philosophical work – work that ought to draw upon the best that each of these traditions has to offer. See “What is Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?”

[85] Kant published his Critique at 57; Habermas published his Theory of Communicative Action at 52; Searle's best book, Intentionality, was published at 51There are, however, exceptions: Berkeley, Hume, Schelling, and Kripke published their best work as they were still young. Curiously, they did not publish works of the same caliber as those of their youth.

[86] Nietzsche, who considered the issue in depth, observed that genius can be "mediocre," recalling the immense difficulty Beethoven had in composing, which required him to rewrite verses countless times until they became incomparable. See his Menschlich alzu menschlich, chap. IV.

[87] This occurs not only in philosophy. Physicists like Carlos Rovelli have criticized the lack of disruptive breakthroughs in theoretical physics in the last 60 years. See “Is Bad Philosophy Holding Back Physics?”

[88] Harry Frankfurt: On Bullshit. Curiously, this is also not a book cited by current metaphilosophers.

[89] See the text by Sigmund Freud entitled The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion).

[90] See Hanna Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

[91] The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, cap. 2 (On genius).

[92] John Searle described the procedure as follows: If your argument leads to an absurd conclusion, don’t blame the premises: declare it a discovery!

[93] “Putnam on Mind and Meaning”.

[94] I know this because I have refuted them. My refutation of anti-verificationism rests upon the verificationism proposed by Wittgenstein, which was distorted by the Vienna Circle. The latter constructed a rigid straw man only to then, quite rightly, reject it (see my Philosophical Semantics, Chap. V). The defense of a modified version of the traditional definition of knowledge – capable of dissolving the Gettier problem without remainder – can be found in Lines of Thought, ch. V. My defense of a Fregean view of indexical utterances against John Perry’s essential indexicals (Lines of Thought, chap. IV). My critique of Kripke, together with the critique of the necessary a posteriori, supplemented by the development of a more consistent and refined theory of reference, is presented in How Do Proper Names Really Work? As for Hilary Putnam’s semantic externalism, I have carefully dismantled it in chapter 8 of Cognitivismo semântico: filosofia da linguagem sob nova chave. (According to Searle, Putnam himself, at the end of his life, confessed to him that he no longer believed in his argument for externalism.) As for dialetheism, the errors were so pervasive that I lacked the patience to refute it in writing; the best that can be said in its favour is that it shows how far an error can lead.

[95] “Everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion” (Jacques Barzun), cited by Susan Haack, in her Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, pp. 188, 192.

[96] In this original sense, intelligence (from intus legere, “to read within”) must not be confused with the means it employs – skills such as those measured by IQ.

[97] Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. p. 182.

[98] See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. See also One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Advanced Capitalist Society.

[99] According to Herbert Marcuse, technological society resists high culture because such culture encourages critical reflection and does not contribute to productivity. In his view, late capitalism produces repressive desublimation: instinctual drives are released, but only in ways that reinforce consumerism and efficiency. Thus, sexual pleasure displayed in a luxury car is celebrated, since it sustains the machinery of production and consumption, while the romantic love of Tristan und Isolde is dismissed as laughable, because it generates neither profit nor efficiency and carries a potentially critical force. See One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Advanced Capitalist Society.

[100] Jackes Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present.

[101] We have reasons to believe that the present Chinese system is a licit alternative to our populist democracies, as something that, in its meritocratic hierarchy, remembers Plato’s Republic. That this system can be refined, and that can, in the end, bring something like a confederation of nations justly satisfying free human wishes, is our most optimistic expectation.

[102] Max Weber, Political Writings, xvi.

[103] Max Weber, The protestantic Ethik and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 236.

[104] Susan Haack, “Scientistic Philosophy, No; Scientific Philosophy, Yes”, p. 30.

[105] Personal notebooks, 1931.

[106] Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, S. 9