ON THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY VII

  

 

 

 

                                                         VII

 

                             COROLÁRIOS E PERSPECTIVAS

 

     

The future eludes the imagination.

 D. M. Jesseph

 

 

In this chapter, I propose several applications of the conclusions reached thus far concerning the general character of traditional philosophy. My aim is to show that this perspective allows for a clearer differentiation among distinct modes of philosophizing, while also providing a fresh interpretation of their historical succession, including the analytical approach.

 

1. FORMS OF PHILOSOPHY

The metaphilosophical triangle discussed in the previous chapter allows us to sketch – albeit intuitively – a cartography of philosophical forms based on their positions within it. The analogy with opera once again proves pertinent. Opera is an artistic production that combines music, poetry, and plot. Here too, we encounter a triangle, whose elements vary in proportion, quality, and degree of mutual integration:

 

MUSIC

 

 

 

PLOT                                                      POETRY

 

At the center of the triangle, formed by plot, music, and poetry, I would situate Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. This work recounts a true episode in which a clown, upon discovering his wife Colombina’s infidelity, murders her during a performance, together with the lover who sought to rescue her. In this case, the three elements coalesce with remarkable precision: the poignant drama, the expressive music, and the intense poetry converge in exemplary fashion. Pagliacci thus occupies the very center of the triangle. A similar observation may be made of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, whose moving narrative intertwines with moments of incomparable melodic beauty.

   Yet such integration is not always fully achieved. Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte presents a fragile plot, conceived primarily as a framework for music and poetry, which, in turn, proves unsurpassable. This opera, therefore, lies at some distance from the vertex of plot, closer instead to melody and poetry, though in its entirety it surpasses Pagliacci. The same might be said of Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper, whose storyline fails to convince despite its author’s political engagement. Finally, consider a dodecaphonic opera such as Berg’s Wozzeck, melodically austere. It withdraws from the musical vertex of the triangle, approaching instead the side that unites poetry and plot.

   A comparable exercise may be undertaken with respect to philosophical works, which can be situated, by analogy, within the space of a triangle whose vertices are science, religion, and art, according to the relative weight of their scientistic, mysticizing, and aesthetic dimensions.

   Consider the case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: through its proto-scientific attempt to construct a pictorial theory of representation, its mystical doctrine of the unsayable, and its aesthetic resources – both structural and rhetorical – this work may be positioned near the center of the triangle, though slightly closer to the scientific vertex, given its explicit aim of analyzing the language of science (certainly under the influence of Russell). By contrast, Wittgenstein’s second major work, the Philosophical Investigations, appears to withdraw somewhat from the scientific vertex, drawing closer instead to the other two points.

   The most striking example of a philosophical work that approaches the center of the triangle is found in the Platonic dialogues. Plato has often been regarded as the philosopher par excellence,[1] precisely because he so vigorously integrates the three dimensions in question. Yet, following Nietzsche’s critique, his philosophy appears to incline more decisively toward the mystical vertex.

   Anyway, Platonic philosophy exhibits a truth-seeking, cognitive, and theoretical dimension (in this sense, proto-scientific), evidenced in the essentially argumentative nature of its dialogues. At their center – the doctrine of Ideas – ontological truths are sought and justified in connection with a theory of our cognitive capacities, articulated alongside broader moral and social concerns. Yet Plato’s philosophy also reveals a powerful mystical-totalizing dimension, evident in the invention of the transcendence of the realm of Ideas and in the attempt to fashion a comprehensive speculative vision of the Demiurge’s construction of the world through the eternal Forms. This dimension manifests itself particularly in the recourse to Orphic myths, in the doctrine of the world-soul, and in the quasi-religious veneration of the Idea of the Good. Finally, there is the aesthetic element, which endows his dialogues with the status of literary works of great beauty and enduring appeal. By balancing these three dimensions – the scientisticizing, the mysticizing, and the aestheticizing – the Platonic corpus remains close to the center of the triangle, exemplifying a philosophical endeavor on the verge of perfection, though, I believe, with a distinctly mystical bias.

   Also situated near the center of the triangle is the work of Aristotle, who, despite his proto-empiricism, never strayed too far from his Platonic roots.[2] Other classical philosophies, such as Descartes's, likewise approach this ideal of integrated influences, some more closely than others. Although both Aristotle and Kant occupy the central area of the triangle, the former lies somewhat nearer to the scientific vertex, dignifying above all the pursuit of truth, while the latter inclines more toward the mystical vertex, especially when one considers his moral philosophy.

   These different dimensions are rarely distributed in such a balanced manner. There are philosophies that lie at the margins, situated closer to particular sides or vertices of the triangle. Aristotle’s philosophy, owing to his empiricist motivations and his achievements as both biologist and logician, stands nearer to the scientific vertex of the triangle than does Plato’s. Many influential German-speaking analytic philosophers – Frege not as much, due to his Platonism, Rudolf Carnap to a much greater degree – also gravitated toward this vertex. The same holds true for English-speaking analytic philosophers of a formalist orientation, directly or indirectly influenced by the Viennese positivist mindset, including W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan.

   The attraction to the scientific vertex, often expressed through scientistic reductionism, was characteristic of philosophers with a formalist orientation. This tendency is evident in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, where (under Russell’s influence) he restricted meaningfulness to scientific language, and in Saul Kripke’s semantic investigations. Yet philosophers of a communicational orientation resist reductionism by reasons already given (Chap. II, sec. 3). Such was the case of the later Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, John Searle, and Paul Grice, though they also found themselves drawn toward the scientific vertex. Similarly, Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of mind deeply influenced by Darwin, aligned himself with empirical science while resisting reductionism. The same pattern can be observed among many original English-speaking philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, and, before him, representatives of the empiricist tradition such as J. S. Mill and John Locke.  The attraction to the scientific vertex, to the point of adopting scientistic reductionisms (evident in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, as he reduced the meaningfulness to the scientific language, due to Russell’s influence, or in Saul Kripke’s semantic investigations), is characteristic of philosophers of formalist orientation. Yet thinkers of a communicational orientation, such as the later Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, John Searle, and Paul Grice, inevitably drew closer to the linguistic scientific vertex as well, just as the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett, influenced by Darwin, aligned himself with empirical science. The same may be said of the majority of original English-speaking philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, and, before him, of representatives of the empiricist tradition, including J. S. Mill and John Locke.

   Let us now turn to those philosophers whose works gravitated toward the mystical-religious vertex of the triangle. Such is the case of Plotinus, St. Augustine, Scotus Eriugena, and St. Thomas Aquinas, owing to their underlying motivations. The same may be said of Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, which helps to explain the breadth of their philosophical systems, along with their tendency to expansionism. Some English philosophers, such as Bishop Berkeley, F. H. Bradley, and J. M. E. McTaggart, likewise followed this path.

   As for thinkers situated closer to the artistic vertex, figures such as Heraclitus and Nietzsche stand out, Nietzsche being explicitly classified as an influential artist-philosopher. His Thus Spoke Zarathustra was judged by Bertolt Brecht to be the greatest lyric poem in the German language (though others prefer Goethe and Rilke). Savants such as Montaigne and Emil Cioran also incline more toward the artistic vertex, at times even surpassing it.

   Finally, there are philosophers who distance themselves markedly from the scientific vertex and draw nearer to the opposite side of the triangle – that which lies between art and religion – as in the cases of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and (to a lesser extent) Jean-Paul Sartre. Their works reveal not only a profound existential and aesthetic concern but also spiritual inquietudes, whether religious or otherwise, far removed from scientific preoccupations.

   Finally, there are the borderline cases, those that overflow the conventional boundaries of philosophical discourse. Novalis and Cioran, for instance, already project themselves into the artistic vertex. Likewise, the work of Jacques Derrida, as well as the most original moments in Gilles Deleuze’s production, may be more positively assessed as experiments spilling over into the artistic domain. These cases can be distinguished from those of artists who operate outside the boundaries of philosophy, though in its vicinity, such as Friedrich Hölderlin and, at times, Goethe.

   Borderline cases situated at the vertex of religious thought include mystics such as Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckhart (whose sermons are imbued with profound anthropological insights of a philosophical nature).

   There are also, of course, zones of intersection between philosophy and science. Consider, for example, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis: although still marked by subjective and non-consensual interpretations, it provides techniques that enable unprecedented insights, scarcely attainable by the introspectionist psychology that preceded it. This is due in large measure to the controlled environment afforded by psychoanalytic practice. Another example of work in this borderland may be found in the anthropological writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose oeuvre seeks to satisfy a scientific ambition while paradoxically retaining an aesthetic dimension.

   Now, what about non-Western philosophies and philosophical traditions? Corroborating our views, the same pattern repeats. Consider Indian philosophy, which developed a wide variety of schools. While it often contains a strong mystical-religious element, from doctrines of reincarnation to teachings that the world is an illusion, to the path of salvation as the dissolution of the self into the whole, by reaching nirvana. It could also express itself through deep, artistic, metaphorical verse. A striking example is found in the Bhagavad Gītā, where Krishna reveals to Arjuna his cosmic form, unstoppable, inevitable, beyond any human control:

 

I am Time, the great destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to annihilate all people. Except for you [the Pandavas], all the soldiers arrayed in the opposing armies shall cease to exist.[3]

 

Indian philosophy was not only mystical and artistic; it also developed refined epistemological, metaphysical, logical, and ethical systems. In Sāṃkhya epistemology, knowledge is gained through perception, inference, and authoritative testimony, each valid within its proper scope. In its philosophy of mind, Sāṃkhya is dualistic, distinguishing between eternal consciousness (Puruṣa) and the material principle (Prakṛti), which encompasses mind, senses, and the physical world.

   Chinese philosophy also developed along many strands, from Confucianism to Daoism, and was deeply concerned with questions of life, ethics, and politics. Its truth-seeking intentions were often expressed through practical aims, making it generally much less mystical than Indian philosophy, though no less profound. It could also carry a strong artistic dimension. One of the most suggestive passages comes from the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreamed he was a butterfly, carefree and happy. Upon waking, he wondered whether he was Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuangzi.

 

1. THREE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS

We may, in conclusion, classify philosophical movements and even the great traditions according to their respective positions within the metaphilosophical triangle. Anglophone philosophy has historically tended toward the scientific vertex; Germanophone philosophy, toward the mystical-religious vertex; and Francophone philosophy, toward the aesthetic vertex. Exceptions confirm the rule. A sociologist could be justified in discerning underlying ideological tensions of institutional nature associated with the distribution of these forms.

   Among the Anglophone traditions are English and North American philosophy. Let us begin with English. Probably owing to advances in science since Isaac Newton and to technical developments, such as the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, English philosophy generally oriented itself toward the scientific perspective. Locke, for example, received scientific training, collaborated with the chemist Robert Boyle, and studied medicine. His empiricism, guided more by common sense than by logical coherence, reflects this inclination well. Philosophers such as Thomas Reid, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham also clearly demonstrated this orientation toward science. Bertrand Russell, the most significant English philosopher of the twentieth century, distinguished himself as a champion of scientific philosophy. The Principia Mathematica was an ambitious, though ultimately unsuccessful, yet fruitful attempt to transform the philosophy of mathematics into a science, conceived as an extension of logic. The same could be said of the works of P. F. Strawson and J. L. Austin. The latter, as I have already noted, succeeded in extracting a scientific theory, the theory of speech acts, from the philosophical domain.

   As for North American philosophy, from C. S. Peirce to W. V. O. Quine, it has always been marked by its reliance on science. Peirce, with scientific training, developed a logic comparable to that of Frege and founded modern semiotics. Philosophers such as Peirce, William James, and John Dewey associated this scientific orientation with pragmatism, which holds that philosophy should serve as an instrument for addressing the concrete problems of life. (The difficulty arises when pragmatism comes to dominate other values, thereby instrumentalizing philosophy, as in the case of Richard Rorty.)

   This proximity to science persisted among later American philosophers of analytic orientation, such as W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan, all of formalist orientation, as well as Daniel Dennett, Paul Grice, and John Searle, whose orientation was more empiricist.

   The authority of science helps to explain the success of challenging formalist-oriented philosophies, such as those of Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan, in a world increasingly driven by scientific outcomes. Yet this alignment has also introduced some limitations that, when combined with Susan Haack's reflections and Max Weber's, may be described as instances of “premature disenchantments of the world.” This is the problem of scientism: the fixation on specific scientific models as exclusive criteria of argumentative valuation, thereby excluding other domains in a reductionist manner. Such an approach may prove useful as a strategy of “divide and conquer,” but when taken to the extreme, it results in division without any conquest at all, that is, in the positivist fragmentation of thought and the loss of attainable comprehensive representations. In other words, it obscures the possibility of sufficiently broad perspectives capable of encompassing indispensable elements for philosophical progress, particularly when philosophy approaches science as a form of knowledge genuinely open to consensus.

   Let us now turn to the Germanophone tradition. From Meister Eckhart to Hegel and Husserl, passing through Leibniz and Kant, German philosophy has consistently displayed a mysticizing inclination, oriented toward the mystical-religious vertex of the metaphilosophical triangle, even though, in Nietzsche, this inclination appears as an atheistic revolt against Christian culture and philosophy.

   Some of its leading figures, such as Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger, even pursued studies in religious seminaries, which reveals the interweaving of philosophical reflection with spiritual inquietude. Historically, this philosophical tradition bears a profound mystical accent, perceptible both in the elusive density of its metaphysical discourse and in its comprehensive pursuit of the ultimate foundations of reality. This systematizing vocation, aspiring to a totalizing comprehension of the world, remains alive, though duly circumscribed, as can be seen in the work of Jürgen Habermas, whose production still resonates with this impulse, albeit under the aegis of communicative reason.     

   Finally, let us consider the Francophone tradition. French philosophy tends to gravitate toward the aesthetic vertex of the triangle. A literary inclination was already present in Montaigne’s Essays and in Descartes’ Meditations. This tendency intensified considerably among philosophers influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, such as J. P. Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reaching its apex in the postmodernist rhetoric of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. This aestheticizing emphasis finds its roots in the extraordinary literary tradition of the French language, which came to infuse philosophical discourse with rhetorical traits. Yet in these later cases, it is not a genuine centering upon the aesthetic dimension, as occurred, for example, with Emil Cioran’s self‑ironic pessimism, but rather an aesthetic centrality coupled with an insincere and rhetorical imitation of the other dimensions of philosophy, most evident in Derrida.

 Just as the excess of scientificity distorted Anglophone philosophy, leading it into scientism and hence into sterility, and just as the excess of mysticism in Germanophone philosophy led into the expansionist intricacies of German idealism, the Francophone tradition allowed itself to be contaminated by literary art and rhetoric. The final outcome was a rhetorical‑literary game, with little or no commitment to truth, in which obvious or questionable arguments were presented in sufficiently obscure form, so that their weaknesses would not be perceived by the inattentive reader. Persistence in this mode of proceeding culminated in a rhetorical parody of genuine philosophical work. Much like a child who plays with an object, pretending it to be the real thing, philosophy came to be simulated, as though mere enactment were sufficient to bring it into being.

   For this reason, as I have already noted, it would be more appropriate to evaluate certain texts of Derrida as installations, works of art that make use of philosophical material. Yet they would then be lesser works, for a genuine work of art, as R. G. Collingwood, in addition to Freud, perceived, manifests itself as a conscious illusion capable of regenerating our awareness insofar as it reveals what a society seeks to conceal from itself. By contrast, the “art” of certain postmodern philosophers, in claiming to situate itself as philosophy beyond conscious illusion, risks serving more the corruption of consciousness than its regeneration, since it prevents the reader from advancing beyond the make‑believe game it establishes.[4] Thus, by traversting some scientific (e.g. formal) or artistic or religious domain into philosophy one can also produce philosophical pathologies.

   From the metaphilosophical triangle, we can trace at least three forms of philosophical pathologies. Philosophy may become purely artistic, disguised as philosophy by mimicking argumentative structures (as in Derrida’s style). It may also collapse into a scientistic formalism, as much of our current formalist work, in which the mystical aura of philosophy is imitated, though the substance is empty or nearly so (as in Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames). Finally, philosophy may imitate the gestures of truth-seeking while remaining essentially mystical in nature (as in Alvin Plantinga).

   However, as theoretically trivial as this cartographic exercise may appear, it nonetheless imposes a certain order upon the debris of philosophical forms. Moreover, it contributes to rendering the universal applicability of the integrated explanation here proposed more plausible.

   Of particular relevance is the historical development within the metaphilosophical triangle, oriented toward its scientific vertex, which, as we have seen, must be understood as a progressivist, consensualizing, and objectivist enterprise (Chapter III, sec. 8).

   Assuming the presupposition of consilience, the general tendency is that philosophical investigations, within their traditional domains, gradually and almost imperceptibly move closer to the scientific vertex. That is, discussions initially wholly aporetic tend, little by little, to narrow their argumentative demands, driven by an intertheoretical reinforcement arising from multiple directions (a reinforcement pre‑justified by the assumption of consilience) until they can be translated into the form of public knowledge legitimately open to consensus.

   Should such a scenario come to pass, it is to be expected that philosophy, at least in its most central domains, will disappear by transforming itself into something other, namely, as a scientific panoramic darstellung in the sense of science as an authentically consensualizable objective knowledge. We may (or could) be approaching this point. In this way, just as we once witnessed the birth of philosophy, we may again witness its death as a profoundly speculative and aporetic enterprise, as we had become accustomed to seeing throughout the tradition until relatively recent times.

   If this is true, philosophy will not die like the opera, dissolving itself in minor forms, like the operettas and the musicals. The greater risk, however, lies in the attempt to hasten this death through seemingly aseptic forms of euthanasia, such as the scientistic fragmentation of philosophy’s central areas into obscure ghettos of proficient intellectual misery – a regressive development some fear may already be taking place today.

 

1. THREE HISTORICAL PERIODS IN THE EVOLUTION OF PHILOSOPHY

As might be expected, the relations between post‑religious and proto‑scientific elements changed with the emergence of the basic sciences. Consequently, the entire historical development of Western philosophy can be interpreted in light of the transformations in the dynamic bond between philosophy and science. This observation invites us to divide the history of philosophy into three major periods, defined by the nature of this relationship, which will here be designated as pre‑formational, para‑formational, and post‑formational.

   In the beginning, there existed only religion and art. The idea of science had not yet arisen, and, therefore, there was little or no space for philosophy. The first period in the development of Western philosophy began with the Greek Pre‑Socratic thinkers. We call this stage the pre‑formational period, insofar as it preceded the constitution of the basic sciences as systematic bodies of knowledge.

   As discussed (Chapter IV), the emergence of Greek philosophy did not arise from dissatisfaction with mythological explanations but, above all, from the advent of the idea of science.[5]  The still fragmentary birth of the earliest scientific theorizing – in fields such as arithmetic, geometry, physics, and astronomy – led the pre‑Socratic thinkers to form, in their minds, a conception of science, both formal and empirical. According to this conception, it would be possible, on the basis of certain data (formal axioms, empirical sensory impressions), to generate generalizations (such as theorems, laws) which, abstracted from their practical applications, would allow one to prove, justify, explain, or predict phenomena. Science thus emerged as an instrument capable of revealing what nature kept hidden, a notion that would later be explicitly articulated in Aristotle’s Organon (for logic and the theory of science) and in Euclid’s Elements (for geometry).

   It is evident that the new model of thought introduced by science was the spark that ignited the flame of philosophical speculation among the pre‑Socratics. It suggested to the human mind the magnificent possibility that the entire world, whose hidden nature until then had been explained exclusively by religion, might be comprehended through abstract generalizations. Although such an undertaking was, at the time, wholly unfeasible as an effective realization, it always remained possible as a speculative exercise. It was precisely within this horizon that the first philosophers, who were also scientists or at least intellectually acquainted with scientific knowledge, sought to explore, fully aware of the fragility of their conjectures.

   In this process, they commonly intermingled their speculations with varying degrees of older anthropomorphic explanations. Yet, as an atomist such as Democritus demonstrated, the anthropomorphic element proved not even indispensable to the philosophical enterprise.

   This first period of philosophical inquiry extended until the Renaissance. Throughout the Middle Ages, although new procedures and developments were incorporated, philosophy remained guided by the idea, originally suggested by science, of explaining the hidden nature of things through conceptual generalizations, without engaging in dialogue with scientific results. This was because science, still incipient and fragmentary, lacked the strength to challenge ordinary conceptions of the world, which, together with religious ideas, constituted the assured background of medieval philosophical reflection.

   The second phase of philosophy began with the Cartesian revolution, which shifted the center of theoretical philosophy from metaphysics to epistemology. Descartes, a mathematician familiar with the developments of both formal and empirical science[6], sought to apply mathematical methods. emphasizing clarity and distinctness as criteria of truth, to his philosophical system.

 

This phase may be termed para‑formational, for it was characterized by the emergence and consolidation of the basic empirical sciences – physics, followed by chemistry, biology, and the human and social sciences – as systematic and independent bodies of knowledge. This movement unfolded in parallel with advances in the formal sciences, encompassing also the practical developments indirectly related to these disciplines (see Chapter III).

   In the philosophical field, this period began with Descartes and extended at least until Hegel. From Descartes onward, philosophy developed, to a greater or lesser extent, as a reaction to the emergence of basic sciences. Much of it was an attempt to reconcile the advancement of science with the rest of our culture and common sense. It is not difficult to perceive that the task of modern philosophy consisted less in preparing the emergence of new scientific fields and their effects than in reformulating and reallocating the ideational material of philosophy’s remaining central domains, in accordance with new scientific ideas, both formal and empirical, and with a new mentality that was gradually taking shape. It was no longer possible to separate science from revealed truths, as St. Thomas Aquinas had attempted. 

   Taking Descartes’ metaphysics as an example, it is difficult to believe that he could have trusted in the fecundity of the geometric method applied to philosophy without first having witnessed its heuristic power in analytic geometry. Likewise, it is hard to see how he could have felt the need to respond to the skeptic had he not been familiar with the argument from illusion, particularly in its scientific formulation, or with the discovery that the heart is not the seat of the passions, as the Greeks had thought.[7]

   Another example is Kant’s so‑called Copernican revolution, marked by the suggestion that we ourselves are the “legislators of the universe”. This idea, as audacious as it is improbable, could only have arisen as an attempt to accommodate our cognitive powers to a supposed absolute knowledge of the applicability (for him necessary and universal) of arithmetic and Euclidean geometry to the sensible world, together with a supposed absolute knowledge of the application (for him also necessary and universal) of the laws of motion and gravitational force discovered by Newton roughly a century earlier.[8]

   The last philosophers to attempt comprehensive metaphysical systems in the traditional sense were the German idealists and, of course, Schopenhauer. After them, the rise of the human and social sciences made such all‑encompassing claims increasingly implausible. Nietzsche, for instance, can be seen as a critic of culture and a psychologist who anticipated psychoanalysis, while Marx emerged as a sociologist whose ideas shaped the Frankfurt School and influenced economists such as J. A. Schumpeter.

   We arrive, then, at what may be considered the post‑formational phase of philosophical development, established after the emergence of the basic sciences. As we have seen, these sciences require a certain order of development, progressing from physics to the social sciences, since it is practically impossible to imagine a more complex and specific basic science arising before a simpler and more general one.

   Today, a range of localized scientific advances is emerging, each of which presupposes the prior establishment of the basic sciences, since they depend directly or indirectly upon them. Much of contemporary philosophy can be understood as a response to these developments – an effort to revise our remaining philosophical conceptions so as to bring them into greater coherence with the perspectives opened up by these scientific breakthroughs.

 

2. ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE WHEELS OF HISTORY

From the perspective adopted here, consideration of the most recent phase in philosophy helps explain why, in the twentieth century, it came to be mistakenly regarded as an activity primarily devoted to conceptual analysis. One reason for this view lies in the advance of the empirical sciences, which came to occupy the space once held by philosophy as speculative inquiry, anticipating scientific knowledge. As a result, philosophy, in its central areas, was increasingly confined to higher‑order, reflective investigations. These included the analysis of (i) epistemic concepts common both to everyday thought and to the basic sciences—such as knowledge, belief, and justification; (ii) metaphysical notions like property, substance, number, existence, event, and process; (iii) concepts from the philosophy of language, such as meaning, truth, and reference; (iv) concepts from the philosophy of mind, including mind, body, thought, and consciousness; and (v) concepts from practical philosophy, such as good, happiness, and justice. Finally, philosophy also sought to explore the possible internal relations among all these conceptual domains. Yet when considered from the standpoint of consilience and the method of successive approximations proposed by Susan Haack, the hope for genuine progress in these areas remains a formidable challenge. Nevertheless, this seems the only fully legitimate way forward.

   Nevertheless, the consolidation of so‑called analytic philosophy was due, in large part, to the recognition of new mechanisms for controlling argumentative procedures, which require a more explicit organization of the logical‑conceptual components of discourse. This demand frequently entails semantic ascent, that is, the treatment of what we say through a semantic metalanguage, along with the possible use of formal methods. Under such circumstances, it became easy to confuse philosophy, in its proper nature, with a mere effort at linguistic‑conceptual clarification.

   Yet both the distancing of philosophical speculation from immediate empirical concerns and the emphasis on linguistic‑conceptual aspects are merely contingent moments within a broader historical trajectory. To say that twentieth‑century philosophy was for the most part, particularly within the Anglophone context, a philosophy of linguistic analysis, is only to describe the form it assumed in a particular historical period, especially – and not to diagnose its essential nature.

   Adopting this perspective, we are better positioned to understand the internal developments of linguistic‑analytic philosophy. Returning to the initial considerations, it becomes clear that the principal achievements of this philosophical movement were intrinsically linked to the development and consolidation of a constellation of scientific theories belonging to the field of semiotics, in the broadest possible sense of the term. Analytic philosophy is connected to semiotics, on the one hand, through the conjectural character that has marked the gradual exploration of this domain (as exemplified by Jürgen Habermas’s ambitious project of universal pragmatics); and, on the other hand, through the unavoidable need to relocate and reformulate our conceptions of traditional philosophical problems in response to advances in this field – including, for instance, Saul Kripke’s extraordinary application of modal logic in his theory of reference.

   The most compelling point in Chapter II is the recognition of a hierarchy among the three domains of semiotics: semantics presupposes syntax, and pragmatics presupposes both syntax and semantics. This order becomes clear when we observe that one can learn the syntax of an uninterpreted language, though abstracting entirely from meaning and communicative use. By contrast, it is nearly impossible to grasp the referential relations of a language, whether in isolated signs, combinations, or polysemous expressions, without first identifying their syntactic structures. Moreover, syntax and semantics can be studied to a considerable extent apart from context, without reference to the pragmatic dimension of communication. Yet pragmatic rules—the use of signs in concrete utterances—cannot be applied without prior knowledge of their syntactic and semantic articulations.

   One implication of this hierarchy is that the historical development of semiotic knowledge likely followed the same trajectory: beginning with syntax, advancing to semantics, and culminating in pragmatics. Another implication, noted in Chapter II (sec. 3), concerns philosophical styles. The formally oriented philosopher (e.g., Saul Kripke) enjoys greater freedom to challenge common sense, abstracting what isn’t of interest through reductionist strategies. On the other hand, the empirically oriented philosopher (e.g., John Searle) must remain attentive to our ordinary language and commonsensical intuitions. This constraint often makes the latter’s ideas less surprising, though frequently stronger and more immediately plausible.

   The foregoing reflections contribute to an understanding of the historical development of analytic philosophy throughout the twentieth century. As a result of the sequence of presuppositions that structures the domains of semiotics, analytic philosophy likewise emerged in three successive waves of investigation. At the end of the nineteenth century, Gottlob Frege was the first to develop a complete symbolic formulation of the predicate calculus, integrated with the sentential calculus. This was an essentially syntactic contribution of unprecedented importance for the development of logic, although it already contained a schematized form of semantics. It would not be much of an exaggeration to affirm that logic, as a science, truly began with Frege.

   The logical atomisms of Bertrand Russell and of the early Wittgenstein may be seen as the principal attempts to integrate issues of the philosophy of content and of epistemology with the revolutionary advances of symbolic logic. Although significant semantic developments arose, such as the distinction between sense and reference, the referentialist theory of meaning in the Tractatus Logico‑Philosophicus, as well as Russell’s speculations on the designata of properly logical names, these elements still played a complementary schematic and to a large extent misleading role.

   The second wave was predominantly semantic: Wittgenstein, in the intermediate phase of his philosophical development, proposed a principle of verification that linked a proposition to the fact that confirms it. From 1929 and at least until his lectures of 1934–35, he suggested that cognitive sense, the propositional content expressed by a declarative sentence, should be constituted by a bundle of modes of verification with different semantic weights. For example, in asserting “Cambridge won the boat race,” diverse modes of verification, such as seeing the boat cross the finish line, hearing the referee’s whistle, receiving the information from someone, reading the news in a newspaper, or seeing the trophy at the club – are ways of verifying the proposition. Taken together, these modes of verification constitute the sense of the declarative sentence, or, if one prefers, the proposition (something equivalent to the Fregean Gedanke) that it expresses.

   As Wittgenstein observed, by progressively eliminating the modes of verification of a sentence like “Cambridge won the boat race”, we weaken the meaning of the sentence, and by suppressing all of them, nothing remains of its sense.[9] This conception points to a predominantly pragmatic investigation of meaning, establishing regions and types of verification that are, in some respects, reminiscent of the theory of speech acts. However, to my knowledge, such a research program was never developed.[10]

   The third wave brought with it efforts to create a science of pragmatics and to accommodate philosophical problems in light of these results. It began with the scattered reflections of the later Wittgenstein on the multiple functions of language, in which the meaning of expressions came to be identified with their use in specific contexts of language games: meaning as a function of the rules of communicative interaction, as what J. L. Austin called illocutionary force.

   The consolidation of pragmatics as a systematic field of investigation of communicative actions was due above all to the works of J. L. Austin in his classical How to Do Things With Words?, to the complementary work of John Searle in Speech Acts, and even to independent contributions such as Paul Grice’s theory of conversational implicatures.

   Investigations in the field of pragmatics also motivated attempts to accommodate old philosophical problems with new theoretical contributions. An early example of this was Wittgenstein’s ultimately unsucessful attempt to restructure and relocate the learning of mentalist language as a result of pragmatic reflections on the necessary interpersonal dimension of language learning. Wittgenstein – who, according to Strawson, harbored a prejudice against subjectivity – in seeking to escape the paradoxical consequence of his private language argument, according to which we cannot learn to speak of our internal states, since these cannot be subjected to interpersonal checking, proposed the replacement of our mentalist language with a problematic doctrine of “criterial expression.” Thus, the natural expression of pain “Ouch!” would be replaced by “It hurts,” which in turn would give way to the statement “I feel pain,” since this would be interpersonally verifiable without the need for reference to the internal sensation of pain.[11]

   Another effort to reformulate philosophical problems, which emerges as an application of pragmatic developments (including speech act theory), is found in Jürgen Habermas’s universal pragmatics. This is a complex philosophical theory whose ultimate aim is to demonstrate how social norms and their possible distortions can be read and corrected through the various ways in which our communicative actions function. Once again, the role of linguistic-conceptual emphasis is evident as a relevant characteristic, though historically contingent and not essential to philosophy as such.

 

3. THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY: PERSPECTIVES AND LIMITS

What may be expected for the future? The socio-historical explanation of philosophy’s nature outlined in this book offers only a few indications for reflecting on the future of philosophy. As a derivative cultural activity, philosophy possesses no guarantees of stability or permanence. Its continuity depends on the historical and cultural conditions that sustain it, inviting us to consider, with caution, its role and relevance within future configurations of thought.

   Returning to the analogy with opera: it developed in parallel with polyphonic music after the Renaissance, reaching its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only to lose nearly all of its relevance in the twentieth, surviving in diminished forms such as the operetta and the musical. Philosophy, however, differs from opera in one fundamental respect: having emerged from mythology and progressively oriented itself toward a legitimate and objective consensus, the true scientific consensus, it may, at least in its central domains, ultimately be supplanted by the latter.

   Even so, philosophy as such may well share the fate of opera. For its best times, in its traditional and most proper sense, are already past. Its moments of grandeur belonged to the great systems of Plato and Aristotle and, in modernity, to the formative period of the basic sciences. In this context, philosophy, in a trajectory that began with Descartes and culminated in Kant, sought to accommodate its conceptions to the practical transformations brought about by the rise of these sciences and the new worldview they fostered. Today, real philosophical inquiry, largely confined to subquestions that arise from residual or borderline nuclei of questioning, seems to advance only in diminished forms. Nonetheless, contemporary philosophy may still more relevant than it might appear. After all, Dreigroschenoper (1928) and Porgy and Bess (1935) do not seem any less significant than Götterdämmerung (1876), at least for those who refuse to be overawed by Wagnerian pathos. The same may be said if we compare Appearance and Reality by the Hegelian F. H. Bradley with Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke, a work of more modest scope, yet profoundly original and challenging.

   It is evident that we may expect the current philosophies of science to evolve into metasciences as we draw closer to a solid consensus regarding the truth of their explanations of the nature of their objects.

   Our greatest expectations, however, remain directed toward the central core of traditional philosophical problems, which, in general, continue to lie beyond the reach of any consensus. The most difficult and complex speculative domains (epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics) are notably comprehensive: epistemology, insofar as it deals with our cognitive access to any object of knowledge; metaphysics, insofar as it seeks to explain, independently of the particular sciences that employ its concepts, the ultimate categories of reality (such as property, substance, existence, causality, identity, part and whole), which traverse not only the multiple forms of scientific knowledge but also our common understanding. Although not as encompassing, ethics has proven to be profoundly integrated into the very core of human social activity, which demands complex argumentative approaches until now unable to reach an unified vision.

   It is true that, although science has occupied many of the spaces once occupied by philosophy, it still proves incapable of encompassing the central domains of the philosophical tradition, from metaphysics to ethics, passing through epistemology. Yet, if we adopt the tolerant conception of science as publicly accessible knowledge capable of legitimate consensus, there seems to be no reason to deny that, in principle, at some future moment, these domains might be absorbed into new forms of science.

   In such a case, however, this absorption would not occur through what is already recognized as science, as scientism proposes, but rather through a reinterpretation of philosophy’s panoramic representations under the presupposition of consilience.

   Here I venture some conjectures. With respect to epistemology, all we need to do is to rid ourselves of the cloud of confusing dust produced by misleading challenges such as the Gettier problem and a defective epistemic externalism, which requires only an adequate internalist reconfiguration, since these obstacles prevent us from clearly perceiving our object of study and freely accessing its central core.[12]

   As for metaphysics, what would be required is an inversion of Platonism, beginning with the treatment of Donald Williams’s tropes[13], understood as spatio-temporally localizable properties, such as this red patch, that circle, or a certain magnetic field. Such properties would serve as the ontological pebbles in the construction of the universe, explaining both material objects and universals and perhaps even “abstract entities” such as numbers – na original, difficult but promising program, which has never truly been attempted.

   And as for ethics, what, in my own view, is called for is the elaboration of a two-level consequentialism, along lines similar to those proposed by R. M. Hare.[14] Ordinarily, we follow the first level, that of rule utilitarianism. However, in situations where no rules are applicable, or where the suffering caused by their maintenance outweighs the benefits of the system, we are compelled to the second level, that of act utilitarianism, though only to some extent, in the manner of Jeremy Bentham, though corrested since, for example, except for masochists, pain points much higher than pleasure in the utilitarian bilance.

   Finally, there is the slippery terrain of political philosophy, about which I can say almost as much as nothing. From Plato to John Rawls, a central concern has been social justice. In principle, social democracy appeared to Rawls and others to be the most reasonable solution, until one considers that, in practice, it almost inevitably transformed into populist oligarchies that offer the people the illusion of choosing what is best for them, while in reality, they are being manipulated by those in power. Plato was aware of this, sharply separating in his Republic those who wield the power of money from those who exercise political authority.

   One possible alternative would be hierarchical meritocratic democracy: individuals elect representatives of their communities, who in turn elect their own representatives, according to a meritocratic schema. Yet the question remains – what should count as merit? In earlier times, human groups competed through warfare, driven by primal instincts. But in the present changeable landscape, where humanity must integrate for its own survival, it a new balance between competition and cooperation makes itself necessary.

    Here again, we find the importance of philosophy: we don’t have a sufficiently good metaphysics, a good epistemology, a unified form of ethics, and a commonly shared view about the best political philosophy, only to begin with. We still don’t have philosophy transformed into a truly consensualizable public knowledge able to give us an overview based mainly on consilience. And the present “hand-to-mouth” analytic philosophy, as I tried to explain in Chapter III, is too fragmented in an idle parroting of science to be really useful.

   A better, non-ideological approach, if we are looking for disruptive development (the only that matters), seems to me to choose the most plausible ideas across the different sub-domains and seek consilience among them. Instead of dividing and conquering, blinding ourselves to the visiono f the whole, try toconquer in order not to divide what should not be divisible. Not the competition, but cooperation; cooperation among ideas through their cosilience.

   Indeed, the development of any of these conjectures would require extensive work of systematic investigation, quite different from the fragmented, improvised, hand-to-mouth philosophy that has become fashionable today.

   The clarification of philosophy as a cultural activity, derived from three fundamental cultural activities, helps elucidate the meaning of the word ‘philosophy’ as it has been applied to the center of gravity of the Western tradition. Nevertheless, this clarification has little to do with the peripheral subfields that today seem to proliferate, even though, in the end, they presuppose an implicit, commonsense understanding of the more comprehensive areas. These subfields correspond to a derivative sense of the term philosophy, capable (hopefully) of preserving only the element of conjecture guided by the pursuit of truth, yet still incapable of attaining legitimate consensus regarding its results.

   Even if philosophy is understood in the extended sense, as everything that escapes legitimate public consensualization, the idea of its complete transformation into science remains improbable. It suffices to observe that whenever new domains of knowledge emerge, a corresponding philosophy tends to arise – not only the theories of the basic sciences, such as the philosophies of physics and psychology, but also the philosophy of technology, of medicine, of information, of the environment, of sexuality and gender, of physical education… And this without even mentioning the philosophies of process, whose results likewise depend on what has yet to occur.

   We can only imagine what it would be like if every philosophy were to be transformed into science in the sense of public, consensually acceptable knowledge. If such were the case, it becomes conceivable to envision a future time in which philosophers and scientists find themselves unemployed, seated side by side, in an intellectually satiated world – a world in which everything worth knowing will already have been investigated and in which no relevant discovery remains to be made.

   In this hypothetical scenario, there would be no space left to accommodate what remains of our philosophical vision in relation to science, since there would be no “remainder” left to integrate. The worldview would then be reduced to the sum of scientific knowledge and modest common sense, with nothing further admitted. And the pursuit of a totality that transcended this framework would, at last, be recognized as an unnecessary and meaningless enterprise.

   Amid so many uncertainties, I insist upon only one point: the central problems of the philosophical tradition cannot be replaced by a multiplicity of “funny hypotheses,” of hyper-specialized microtheories, pseudo-scientific, unrelated to one another, disconnected from reality, and scarcely inspiring, as suggested by the positivist-scientistic fragmentation of the field of experience that today proliferates under the name of analytic philosophy. The liberality and flexibility of our concept of science, together with the notion of consilience applied to the articulation between central philosophical questions and other domains of knowledge, point rather to the ideal possibility that consensual achievements may become sufficiently refined and comprehensive as to assume their place as science, thus preserving the suspected value of the inquiries from which they originated.       

   In this hypothetical scenario, there would be no space left to accommodate what remains of our philosophical vision in relation to science, since there would be no “remainder” left to integrate. The worldview would then be reduced to the sum of scientific knowledge and modest common sense, with nothing further admitted. In this way, we could, in principle, approach a true scientific panoramic representation that should be far beyond the present scientistic expectations. On the other hand, the pursuit of a totality that transcended this framework would, in the end, be recognized as an unnecessary and meaningless enterprise.

    In contemporary analytic philosophy, the strategy of “divide and conquer” has already far exceeded its limits. Yet, as the field has become riddled with “funny hypotheses” of every sort, the work of clearing these mines will only be possible once it becomes evident to all that the sheer accumulation of mines has rendered the terrain entirely infertile.

   Without the comprehensive theory here outlined, the problem of the nature of philosophy, if subjected to an attempt at unified consideration, might well appear as what Winston Churchill once described as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” A riddle that is often quickly passed along, if not severely distorted. Yet whoever has read and grasped the present text can scarcely avoid the impression that, among the many riddles bequeathed to us by philosophy, the riddle wrapped in mystery which philosophy itself imposed – the riddle of its own nature – has by these means found a new path to a response that is contemporary, complete, and definitive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                               REFERÊNCIAS

 

 

Adorno, T., Horkheimer, M. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso Books, 2016.

Agostinho de Aosta, De Magistro. Kirion, 2017.

Agostinho de Aosta, Confessiones in Latin – Books I to XIII. Contubernales, 2023.

Aquino, T. Summa Theologica. Thomas More Pr., 5 vols. 1981 (1274).

Aristóteles, The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. J. Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1985).

Armstrong, D. M.: The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction, Westview Press, 1999.

Austin, J. L., How to do Things with Words (1962). Martino Fine Books 2018.

- Sense and Sensibilia. G. J. Warnock (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1962.

- Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press, 1961.

Ayer, J. L., Language, Truth and Logic, Victor Gollancz Ltda., 1936.

- “Metaphysics and Common Sense”, in Metaphysics and Common Sense, Freman Cooper, 1969.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Baker, G. P. & Hacker, P. M. S., Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Bengson, J., T. Cuneo, R. Shafer-Landau, Philosophical Methodology: From Data to Theory. Oxford University Press 2022.

Barnes, J. “Metaphysics”, in Jonathan Barnes (org.), Aristotle. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Barzun, J. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of History of Civilization from 1500. Harper Perennial 2001.

Benjamin, W. Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Kritische Gesamtsausgabe 19. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010.

Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Hackett, 1982.

Berlin, I., Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. Oxford University Press, 1978.

- “The Purpose of Philosophy”, in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, (ed.) H. Hardy, Princeton University Press, 1998.

Blanchard, B., On Philosophical Style, Greenwood Press, 1969.

- “The Philosophic Enterprise”, em C. J. Bontempo and S. J. Odell (eds.), The Owl of Minerva, New York, 1975.

Bobik, J. (ed.), The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry, Notre Dame, 1969.

Boghossian, P., Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructionism. Clarendon University Press, 2006.

Bontempo, C. J., and Oddell, S. J. (eds): The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Botton, Alain de.: The Consolations of Philosophy. Hamish Hamilton, 2000.

Bridgman, P. W. The Logic of Modern Physics. Lettel Books, 2024.

Broad, C. D., “Critical and Speculative Philosophy”, in J. H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy. Allen & Unwin, 1924.

- “Two Lectures on the Nature of Philosophy”, in Inquiry 1, n. 2, 1958.

- Scientific Thought, Peterson 1959.

Cappelen, H., Gendler, T. S., Hawthorne, J. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Carnap, R., “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” In Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. University of Chicago Press, 1958.

- “On the Character of Philosophical Problems”, in R. Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, Chicago, 1967.

- “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch die logische Analyse der Sprache”, in Erkenntnis 2, 1931-32. Translated to English by A. Pap as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism, Free Press, 1966.

- Logische Syntax der Sprache, Prentice Hall, 1934.

Chappell, V. C. (ed.), Ordinary Language: Essays in Philosophical Method, Prentice Hall, 1964.

Clark, A., D. Chalmers, “The extended Mind”, in Analysis, vol. 58, n. 1, 1998.

Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. Clarendon Press, 1960.

Comte, A., Cours de Philosophie Positive, in Œuvres, Éditions Anthropos, 1968 (1830-1842), vols. I e V.

- Discours sur l’esprit positif. Société Positiviste Internationale, 1932.

Copleston, F. C. A History of Philosophy. Image ed., 1994.

Costa, C. F., How Do Proper Names Really Work? De Gruyter, 2023.

- Philosophical Semantics: Reintegrating Theoretical Philosophy. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.

- Lines of Thought: Rethinking Philosophical Assumptions. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

DeLancey, C. “Simplicity and the Skeptical Paradox”, Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 27, 2, pp. 97–113. 2004.

Deleuze, J. & F. Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Éditions de Minuit, 1991.

Dennett, D. C., Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Penguin Books, 2013.

- Higher-Order Truths about Chmess”, Topoi, 25, 39-41, 2006.

Descartes, R., Discours de la méthode, suivi des Méditations métaphysiques. Avec synthèse et analyse des œuvres. Independently published, 2023.

Diels, H. & W. Kranz (eds.), Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Berlin 1961.

Dilthey, W., Die Typen der Weltanschauungen und ihre Ausbildung in die metaphysischen Systemen. Grim Verlag, 2008.

- Dilthey, W., Selected Writings. Ed. H. P. Hilkman, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Dummett, M., Frege: Philosophy of Language, London 1981 (2^nd ed.).

- “Can Analytic Philosophy be Systematic and Ought it to Be?”, in M. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, London 1978.

- The Origins of Analytic Philosophy, London 1993.

Edwards, P., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. McMillan 1967 (8 vols.).

- “Heidegger’s Quest for Being”, in Philosophy 64, 1989.

Eliot, T. S. “Four Quartets”, in T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays. Faber and Faber, 1969.

Empiricus, S., Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Rowman & Littlefield, 1990.

Eriugena, J. S. Periphyseon: The Division of Nature. Dumbarton Oaks, 2025.

Evans, D., Emotions: The Science of Sentiment. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Fichte, J. G., Grundlagen der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. Createspace, 2023.

Fogelin, R., Pyrrhonian Reflexions on Knowledge and Justification. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Frege, G., “Der Gedanke“. Fachzeitschrift Beiträge zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus, 1918.

Freud, S., Die Traumdeutung, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1987 (1900).

- Das Ich und das Es. Im Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Verlag, 1923.

- Die Zukunft einer Illusion. Neopubli GmbH, 2021.

Gabriel, G., Erkenntnis. De Gruyter, 2015.

Gardner, M. Relativity Explained, Dover 1962,

Genovese, J. “Snakes and Ladders: A Reappraisal of the Triune Brain Hypothesis”. Evolutionary Psychology, vol.5, n.1, 147-154, 2007.

Gibbon, E. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, East India Publishing Company, 2022.

Gill, J. H. “Philosophy as Art.” Metaphilosophy 14, no. 2, April 1983. Metaphilosophy.

Glock, H-J. (ed.), The Rise of Analytical Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Goodman, N., The Languages of Arts, Hackett Publishing Company, 1976.

Grayling, A. C. The History of Philosophy. Penguin Books, 2019.

Grayling, A. C. Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Grice, P.: “Postwar Oxford Philosophy”, in Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, 1982.

Guthrie, W. K. C., A History of Greek Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1981 (7 vols.).

Haak, S., “Scientistic Philosophy: No; Scientific Philosophy: Yes.” In The Quarterly Journal of Philosophical Investigations, vol. 15, 2016, Autumn 2021.

– “The Fragmentation of Philosophy: The Road to its Reintegration.” In J. F. Göhner, Eva-Maria Jung (Hrsg.) Reintegrating Philosophy. Springer, 2016.

– “The Long Arm of Common Sense.” In her Defending Science – Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. Prometeus Book, 2003.  

– Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essais, Chicago University Press, 1998.

Habermas, J., Erkenntnis und Interesse, Suhrkamp Verlag 1973.

- “Wahrheitstheorien“, in H. Fahrenbach (Hrsg.), Wirklichkeit und Reflexion, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973.

Habermas, J., Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 Bände. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014.

Hadot, P., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Wiley-Blackwell, 1995.

Hamer, D. H. The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes Doubleday, 2004.

Hamlyn, D. W., A History of Western Philosophy. Viking Adult, 1987.

Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point. Clarendon Press, 1982.

Harendt, A., Eichmann em Jerusalém. Companhia das Letras, 1999.

Harré, R., One Thousand Years of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Harris, S. Free Will. Free Press, 2012.

Hawking, S. & Mlodinow, L., The Great Design. Bantam Press, 2010.

Hegel, G. W. F., Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830).

- Hegel, G. W. F., Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). Reclam, 2020

- Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, Werke, Band 2, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1979

Heidegger, M. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Vittorio Klosterman, 1983 (1935).

- Sein und Zeit. Walter de Gruyter, (1927) 2006.

Hescher, N.: Philosophical Dialetics: An Essay on Metaphilosophy, State University of New York Press, 2006.

Hessen, J., Erkenntnistheorie, Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchandlung, 1926.

Hobbes, T., Leviathan (1651). Hackett (1651) 1994.

Hook, S., “Scientific Knowledge and Philosophical ‘Knowledge’”, in The Quest for Being. Prometheus Books, 1991.

Huemer, M., “Publishing Philosophy”, in https://spot.colorado.edu/.

Hume, D., A Treatise on Human Nature (1740). Creastespace, 2015.

Husserl, E., “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”, in Q. Lauer (ed.), Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Harper & Row, 1965.

Husserl, E., Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und zu einer phänomenologischen Philosophie. Felix Meiner Verlag, 1971.

Hussey, E., The Presocratics. Hackett Publishing Company, 1995.

Hutto, D., E. Myin. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. MIT-Press, 2014.

Inwood, M., A Heidegger Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Isaacson, W., Einstein, His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Jackson, F., From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

James, W., Some Problems in Philosophy (1911). University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Kant, E., Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Suhrkamp, 1976.

- Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,  MV-Philosophy, 2020.

- Kritik des Urteils, Suhrkamp, 1976.

Kaplan, D., “Demonstratives“. Almong et all (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, Oxford, 1989.

Kekes, J., The Nature of Philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield, 1980.

Kenny, A., Aquinas on Mind, Routledge, 1993.

- “Wittgenstein and the Nature of Philosophy”, in A. Kenny, The Legacy of Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, 1984.

- A New History of Western Philosophy. Clarendon Press, 2004, vols I- IV.

Kosliki, K., Form, Matter, Substance. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E., Schofield, M., The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2nd ed.

Kriegel, U. (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Kripke, S. Reference and Existence. Oxford University Press, 2018.

- Wittgenstein on Rule and Private Language. Harvard University Press, 1982.

- Naming and Necessity. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003.

Latour, B. & S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press, 1986.

Lazerowitz, M., ‘A Note on “Metaphilosophy”. Metaphilosophy, 1970, 1(1), pp. 91–91.

Lehrer, K., Theory of Knowledge, Routledge, 2000.

Leibniz, G. W., Leibniz: Discours de métaphysique, Essais de théodicée, Monadologie. Flammarion, 2008.

Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Penguin Books, 1998.

Magee, B., Men of Ideas. Oxford University Press, 1978.

- Confessions of a Philosopher, New York, 1999.

Marcuse, H., One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of the Advanced Industrial Society, Bacon Press, 2012.

Marx, K., F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Fingerprint Publishing 2024.

McDowell, J. “Putnam on Mind and Meaning”, in A Pessing & S. Goldberg, The Twin Earth Chronicles, M. E. Sharpe, 1996.

McGuinn, C. Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry. Blackwell 1993.

McLean, P. D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. Springer 1990.

Merton, R. K., “The Normative Structure of Science”, in The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Moore, G. E., “What is Philosophy?”, in Some Main Problems of Philosophy. Humanities Press (1953), 1978.

- “A Defense of Common Sense”, in his Philosophical Papers. George Allen & Unwin, 1959.

Morris, C. W., Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938) Chicago, 1970.

Mulligan, K., Simons, P. and Smith, B., “What is Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy”. Topoi 25 (2006), 63-67.

Newman, J. N.: The Idea of University. Longman, 1947.

Nielsen, K., “What is Philosophy?”, in History of Philosophy Quarterly 10, n. 4, 1993.

Nietzsche, F., Friedrich Werke in vier Bänden, Caesar Verlag, 1980.

- Der Antichrist, Digitale kritische Gesamtausgabe, 2025.

Overgaard, S., P., Gilbert, S. Burwhood: An Introduction to Metaphilosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Passmore, J., “Philosophy”. In Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Collier-McMillan 1967, vol. 6.

Peeters, B., Derrida Polity, 2013.

Plato, Collected Dialogues. Ed. by E. Hamilton & H. Cairns, Princeton University Press, 1963.

Plotinus. The Six Enneads. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.

Popper, K. R., Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford University Press, 1972.

- Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul,1963.

-  The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957.  

 - The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, 1959.

Price, H. H., ‘Clarity is not Enough’, in H. D. Lewis (ed.), Clarity is not Enough: Essays in Criticism of Linguistic Philosophy. Allen & Unwin, 1963.

Prufer, T. Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy. Catholic University of America Press, 2018.

Putnam, H., “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, in A. Pessing, S. Goldberg (eds.), The Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years of Reflections on Putnam’s “The Meaning of Meaning”. Routledge, 2016.

Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object, Cambridge University Press, 1960.

- “A Letter to Mr. Ostermann”, in C. J. Bontempo & S. J. Odell (eds.), The Owl of Minerva, McGraw-Hill, 1975.

- “Epistemology Naturalized”, in H. Kornblith (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology, MIT-Press, 1994.

Quinton, A., “Philosophy”. In T. Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Rakhimberdina, Z., Jodelet, Q., Liu, X., & Murata, T., “Natural Image Reconstruction From fMRI Using Deep Learning: A Survey”. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 2021.

Reale, G., Storia della filosofia antica. Vita e Pensiero, 1991 (5 vol.).

Reichembach, H., The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, University of California Press, 1968.

Reidt C. P., Raglan S. (eds.), What is Philosophy. Yale University Press, 2001

Rescher, N.: Philosophical Dialetics: An Essay on Metaphilosophy. State University of New York Press, 2007.

Rorty, R. (Ed.). The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. University of Chicago Press, 1967.

- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, 1979.

Rovelli, C. “Is Bad Philosophy Holding Back Physics?” Nature, Vol. 641, 585–587, 2025.

Russell, B. My Philosophical Development. Allen & Unwin, 1959.

-  A History of Western Philosophy (1946). Simon & Schuster, 1976.

- Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). Createspace, 2017.

Ryle, G., “Systematic Misleading Expressions.” In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 32, 1931-2.

Searle, J. Seeing Things as they Really are. Oxford University Press, 2015.

- Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

- Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, Basic Books, 1998.

- Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

- “Proper Names”, Mind 67, 1958, 166-173.

Sellars, Wilfrid: “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”. In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1963, pp. 1-40.

Sinclair, A., What is Philosophy? An Introduction. Dunedin, 2008.

Scharf, R. S., Comte After Positivism. Cambridge University Press,1995.

Schlick, M., Hahn, H., Neurath, O., The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (1929). (The Circle’s Manifest)

- “The Future of Philosophy”, in R. Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Schiller, F. C. S., “Must Philosophers Disagree?”. In Must Philosophers Disagree? And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. McMillan, 1934.

Schmaus, W., “A Reappraisal of Comte’s Three-State Law”, in History and Theory 21 (2), 1982.

Schumpeter, J. A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. HarperCollins, 2008.

Smart, J. J. C., “The Province of Philosophy” in Philosophy and Scientific Realism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.

- “My Semantic Ascents and Descents”, em C. J. Bontempo & S. J. Odell (eds.), The Owl of Minerva. New York, 1975.

Soames, S., Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism. Princeton University Press, 2005.

- “The Era of Specialization”, in Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2. Princeton University Press, 2003.

Spinoza, B. Ética. Ed. Bilingue, ed. Autêntica, 2007.

Strawson, P. F., “Metaphysics”, in D. F. Pears (ed.), The Nature of Metaphysics, McMillan,1957.

- Individuals. Methuen & Co, 1959.

- “Analysis, Science and Metaphysics”, in Richard Rorthy (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. University of Chicago Press, 1967.

- Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 1992.

- The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 2018.

Taylor, A. E., Aristotle (1916). Dover, 1956.

Tolman, R. C. Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology (1934). Dover 1987.

Tugendhat, E., Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie. Suhrkamp 1976.

- “Überlegungen zur Methode der Philosophie aus analytischer Sicht“, in: Philosophische Aufsätze. Suhrkamp, 1992.

Turgot, A.-R.-J., Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses (1750). Doyle Kim, 2017.

Urmson, J. O., Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Two World Wars. Oxford University Press, 1956.

Van Fraassen, B., The Scientific Image. Clarendon Press, 1980.

Varela, F., E. Thompson, E. Rorsh, The Embodied Mind. MIT-Press, 1991.

Viasa, K. D., Bhagavad Gita as it is. Ed. B. S. Phabhupada, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 2021.

Waismann, F., The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan 1997.

Weber, M. Wissenschaft als Beruf (1919). Henricus, 2019.

- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. George Allen & Urwin, transl. by Talcott Parsons, 1930.

- Political Writings. Ed. Peter Lassman, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Williams, D. C., “On the Elements of Being I”, The Review of Metaphysics, 1953, vol 7(1), 3-18.

- On the Elements of Being II. The Review of Metaphysics, 1953, 7(2), 171-92.

Williamson, Timothy: The Philosophy of Philosophy. Wiley Blackwell (sec. ed.) 2022.

- Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2018.

- Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Wilson, E. O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage Books, 1999.

Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung). Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

- Philosophical Investigations – Philosophische Untersuchungen. Basil-Blackwell, 1984.

- The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations. Basil Blackwell, 1975.

- Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1932-1935. Ed. by Alice Ambrose, Prometheus Books, 1979.

Wright, G. H. v.., “Analytic Philosophy: A Historic-Critical Survey”, in The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays. Leiden, 1993.

Zhuangzi. The Complete Writings: Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.

Ziman, J. M., Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of Science. Cambridge University Press, 1968.

- “What is Science?”, in E. D. Klemke, Robert Hollinger & A. D. Kline, Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science. New York, 1980.

 

---

[1] Famous is A. N. Whitehead’s exaggerated remark: “All of Western philosophy is nothing more than a series of footnotes to Plato’s philosophy.”

[2] Ver W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. VI, cap. XIII.

[3] Bhagavad Gita, Chap. 11, 32. The Pandavas were the five heroic and virtuous figures of the Mahābhārata.

[4] In his book The Principles of Art, Collingwood distinguished what he called proper (true) art from art as mere entertainment. Proper art is an expression capable of regenerating consciousness, since it can bring to light what a society represses and ignores but, for reasons of survival, needs to acknowledge.

[5] One might ask how Eastern philosophies fit into this discussion. Their case would merit a separate study, for they initially stood at a greater distance from the idea of science than did the Greeks. Hegel famously regarded Eastern thought, not as philosophy proper but as wisdom, on the grounds that it lacked the argumentative rigor characteristic of philosophy in the Western tradition. There is some truth in this view: Indian philosophy was often intertwined with religion, while Chinese philosophy tended to focus on practical questions of human conduct and social order rather than abstract speculation.

[6] In mathematics, Descartes developed analytic geometry, capable of translating spatial forms into algebraic equations; moreover, he was familiar with and accepted Galileo’s physics and Copernicus’s astronomy.

[7] Aristotle, like most, believed that the heart was the center of passions and spirituality. For him, the brain was the organ of reason, whose function was to cool the heat produced by the heart. Plato and Galen, however, were the main defenders of the encephalocentric view. See A. E. Taylor, Aristotle, pp. 61-62.

[8] The first view was overturned with the development of non-Euclidean geometries in the 19th century, while the latter was shown to be inadequate by Einstein’s general relativity in 1915. Relativity demonstrated that in the presence of gravitation, space-time must be described by Riemannian geometry rather than the flat geometry of Euclid.

[9] Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2001): Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1932–1935, p. 29. (See Appendix I) As I have already noted, logical positivists made a simplistic formalist interpretation of Wittgenstein's concept of verification, only to discover that they were wrong, which led to the misleading “inherited wisdom' that the principle is false. This seems to me to be the greatest blunder of contemporary analytical philosophy.

[10] In 1927, P. W. Bridgman presented, in his book The Logic of Modern Physics, an operationalist conception of physics. According to this conception, scientific concepts have meaning only if they are defined by measurable operations. One consequence is that even a single concept could have a variety of modes of application (measurable operations) capable of conferring meaning upon it, which contrasts with the methodological rigidity of logical positivism. What Bridgman wrote about scientific concepts Wittgenstein said about ordinary language statements.

[11] Philosophical Investigations, I, sec. 244-258.

[12] Claudio Costa: “A Perspectival Definition of Knowledge”.

[13] According to Williams: “Any possible world, and certainly our own as well, is completely constituted by its tropes and their connections of location and similarity and whatever others there may be.” “On the Elements of Being I”, p. 8.

[14] R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: its Levels, Method, and Point, chap. 3.