BY OTTO PAANS[1] 1. Introduction In the first installment in this series on the nature and varieties of philosophical bullshit, I dealt with the topic of incoherent philosophical bullshit. In this second installment, I deal with professional philosophical bullshit. There are multiple ways of dealing with this topic. One way would be to collect samples … [continue reading]
Author Archives: Otto Paans
Between Familiarity and Bewilderment: Towards A Theory of Incoherent Philosophical Bullshit. A No-Bullshit Approach to Philosophical Bullshit, part I. (Studies in Critical Metaphilosophy & Critical History of Philosophy 6)
BY OTTO PAANS. 1. Introductory Moves The output of philosophical practice is extremely varied in its topics and starting points. There are numerous theories of mind, different conceptions of knowledge and truth-value in epistemology, various metaphysical visions about the structure of reality, and varying strands of ethics, ranging from virtue ethics to Kantianism to utilitarianism … [continue reading]
From Professional Vocabularies and the Ethics of Terminology to Presentational Polymorphism: A Conversation about Otto Paans’s “The Pre-Structured Professional Philosopher.” (Re-edited February 2018)
Z: OP’s essay, “The Pre-Structured Professional Philosopher,” leads in many fascinating directions, and has correspondingly many important implications. But before I get down to that, I want to quote, between the horizontal lines directly below, a few pages of a highly APP-relevant, prescient, and characteristically beautifully-written, jargon-free essay by Susan Haack from the late 2000s, … [continue reading]
The Pre-Structured Professional Philosopher: Vocabularies in Action. (Re-edited February 2018)
At least since Bacon’s 1620 Novum Organum, the ideal of acquiring knowledge about the natural world as well as the world of human affairs has critically hinged on the ideal of a distanced, dispassionate observer who just documents the observations he makes. In philosophy and science, formal logic and clear, transparent methods have long been … [continue reading]