TY - CHAP
T1 - Anti-theory in Philosophy
T2 - A Case for Pragmatism
AU - Nevo, Isaac
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.
PY - 2025/1/1
Y1 - 2025/1/1
N2 - In this paper, I discuss the tendency in philosophy to become an excessively theoretical enterprise, an enterprise aspiring to such highly generalized viewpoints on reality, mind, language, or ethics that its “findings” lose touch with lived experience and with broader intellectual concerns and become highly “scholastic,” wedded to abstractions, ideals, dichotomies, and principles that do not find any clear application in everyday life and discourse. I distinguish two types of reaction to this philosophical tendency, a quietist versus a pragmatist reaction, the one being entirely hostile to philosophical thought, the other attempting to revitalize philosophy with practical, or dynamic, models of philosophical activity. Following Dewey, I offer a diagnosis of over-theorizing in philosophy, and suggest a remedy, focusing on the inseparable connectedness of a philosophical observer with “objects” of her observation, be it reality, mind, value, or knowledge, which (so I claim) both motivates and delimits the philosophical aspiration for generality and transcendence. Along the way I discuss relevant contributions by Wittgenstein, James, Dewey, Putnam, Nagel, Elgin, Feyerabend, Williams, Quine, Kitcher, and Pettit.
AB - In this paper, I discuss the tendency in philosophy to become an excessively theoretical enterprise, an enterprise aspiring to such highly generalized viewpoints on reality, mind, language, or ethics that its “findings” lose touch with lived experience and with broader intellectual concerns and become highly “scholastic,” wedded to abstractions, ideals, dichotomies, and principles that do not find any clear application in everyday life and discourse. I distinguish two types of reaction to this philosophical tendency, a quietist versus a pragmatist reaction, the one being entirely hostile to philosophical thought, the other attempting to revitalize philosophy with practical, or dynamic, models of philosophical activity. Following Dewey, I offer a diagnosis of over-theorizing in philosophy, and suggest a remedy, focusing on the inseparable connectedness of a philosophical observer with “objects” of her observation, be it reality, mind, value, or knowledge, which (so I claim) both motivates and delimits the philosophical aspiration for generality and transcendence. Along the way I discuss relevant contributions by Wittgenstein, James, Dewey, Putnam, Nagel, Elgin, Feyerabend, Williams, Quine, Kitcher, and Pettit.
KW - Entanglement
KW - Generality
KW - Pluralism
KW - Pragmatism
KW - Quietism
KW - Scientism
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105043503108
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-82498-2_9
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-82498-2_9
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:105043503108
T3 - Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
SP - 159
EP - 181
BT - Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
PB - Springer International Publishing
ER -