Analytical Philosophy

Analytical Philosophy, por Roger Scruton.

It is very difficult to arrive at any consensus concerning the nature of analytical philosophy. For me it involves using words carefully and testing arguments for their validity rather than for the political correctness of their conclusions. It also requires, as I see it, an undeceived openness to experience and a desire to describe the human world as it is. I cannot help concluding, therefore, that a rigorous analytical philosopher would tend to be a conservative. I find it hard to believe that such a philosopher would be taken in by the charlatanry of Derrida, or by the mendacious historiography of Foucault; I cannot believe that he would have any time for the kind of agenda-dominated scholarship that has colonised Modern Language Review and similar publications in America. ###

But it seems that my view of things is also coloured by wishful thinking. I discover in an impeccably dull work on analytical ethics by Sabina Lovibond, continual references to Derrida as an authority; I read the early work of Richard Rorty with interest and agreement, only to discover that, as a result of a conversion experience whose nature I can only guess at, he has put his weight behind the ‘us against them’ philosophy of the academy, seeing truth as a social construct, and argument as a game of power.

And then there is Peter Singer – a thinker who conforms to a kind of caricature portrait of the analytical philosopher, rigorously applying to every moral question a form of argument that is refuted by the conclusions he derives from it, but to which he remains as immovably attached as a logician to modus ponens.