In the most general if unconventional terms, science is the study of how man is part of the universe. Philosophy is the study of man’s ideas of the universe and how man differs from the rest of the universe. It has of course been recognized that philosophy and science are not totally disjointed. Science is in any case not a monolithic entity but refers to knowledge as the results of reasoning a...

Traditional representations of philosophy have tended to prize the role of reason in the discipline. These accounts focus exclusively on ideas and arguments as animating forces in the field. But anecdotal evidence and more rigorous sociological studies suggest there is more going on in philosophy. In this article, we present two hypotheses about social factors in the field: that social factors ...

One reason is explained why the pursuit of modal logic’s original aim of evaluating the formal validity of arguments turning on necessity and possibility in a ‘metaphysical’ sense must cross borders and draw the logician into ‘metaphilosophy’. John P. Burgess Department of Philosophy Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544-1006, USA [email protected]

This paper argues that an individualist perspective is a crucial element of William James’s metaphilosophical outlook. In broad outline, the argument attributes to James can be characterized like this. Disputes among philosophers about optimal point view from which consider this or philosophical problem are themselves only adequately adjudicated perspective. That is, when it comes assortment im...

I shall propose metaphilosophy of mind as the philosophy of mind investigating mind. That is to say, I pose the question of how knowledge of mind provided by cognitive science, broadly construed, is constrained by the epistemic position of the knower, i.e. by the very fact that it is undertaken by a mind. Here I would like to propose a minimal framework, based on two distinctions: (i) the stand...